A Seagate hdd in my brothers laptop started giving errors, and after booting the blue check disc screen appeared. The check disc always froze at 0% but it is skippable.

Here's what i've done so far.

1. Backed up the important stuff.
2. I put the hdd into a external box
2.5 I attached it to another working computer
3. Ran the latest SeaTools which failed pretty much at everything, only the short generic test completed.
4. iRan the windows vista check disc, however that takes more than 12h to complete and not sure if it even does anything because it didn't give a report.

So any suggestions?

And what would be the result of a format be in this case.

not sure... did it do sector checks? From the title, it sounds like it did. If it's failling a lot of those, chances are the drive is bad. A regular format won't probably cure that, though if you've rescued everything off of it, it certainly won't hurt to try.

You could also try the "low level format". I was under the impression it did more than it apparently does now... Here's a faq on seagate's site on their version of a low level format.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... NewLang=en

I'd recommend the full disk check so any bad sectors can be marked appropriately.

Of course, even if this works, if the drive is really going crazy, chances are it's just going to fail in the near future. I'd recommend replacing it rather than take any risks.

Well it seems that the windows checkdisc is not total waste of space since the hdd is up and running for the time being. But i guess time will tell the truth.

Yea, you'll find out sooner or later. Just keep anything important off of it so if it fails, you don't lose anything you care about.