ok i ran spinrite on my screwed up hdd. on the screen where it asks you to select drives and patiotions i have this

Dos A: undetermined format

Drive 0 primary/master
part1 kinux native
part 2 linux swap

i ran spinrite on part1 and part2 everything fine

but on dos A it says on the right unable to read sector zero.

what does this mean im going to try and delete all partitions and reformat now

Does this PC have a floppy. Is that considered drive A?

no no floppy. it does have a cd drive not sure what its considered tho. the reason im running this is because when i boot the os it will ust freeze up on my as soon as i touch it. i ran mem test and it passed so im guessing its the hdd and i was told that if there is a problem with the hdd spinrite will find it.

This:

Drive 0 primary/master
part1 kinux native

is where I would run spinrite.....

i did no errors

when i boot the os it will ust freeze up on my as soon as i touch itSome more details about your system and whether there are any GRUB or LILO screens would help in trying to determine the nature of your problem. Since you can presumably boot to Spinrite on a CD have you tried booting to your Linux CD to repair things or maybe tried a Live CD such as Knoppix or Ubuntu. It sounds like the Linux boot process or file system needs checking/repairing - rather than looking for a hardware fault as such.