Kurak
03-01-2004, 01:32 PM
When he starts up his computer, he gets a message saying "a disk read error occured"...
The drive makes some funny repetative humming noise and it won't boot into windows. He said this started by programs crashing IN windows accompanied by the strange humming noise. Now he can't boot at all...
He booted up with his windows xp boot disk, and when it said "setup is checking your system", the strange noise came back, and the program never loaded. I told him to disable the HDD in the bios, and that allowed him to get to the repair console and the install screen, but when he ran chkdsk...the noise was still there, and it stayed at 0%. It did say C:\Windows and the hard drive IS detected in the bios, but I really think this COULD be a hardware problem.
If you have any suggestions, I'd apreciate it, whether it could be a bad boot sector, etc, or ANYTHING that is fixable via software...If not, that brings me to my next question...
Since this is an old computer and it needs a replacement drive, should he bother going past 80GB? That seemed to be the best deal in price per gigabyte. Also, if I buy an ATA 100/133 compatible drive, will it work on his ATA66 motherboard? I was always under the impression that it would simply conform to the speed of the motherboard IDE interface.
Kurak
The drive makes some funny repetative humming noise and it won't boot into windows. He said this started by programs crashing IN windows accompanied by the strange humming noise. Now he can't boot at all...
He booted up with his windows xp boot disk, and when it said "setup is checking your system", the strange noise came back, and the program never loaded. I told him to disable the HDD in the bios, and that allowed him to get to the repair console and the install screen, but when he ran chkdsk...the noise was still there, and it stayed at 0%. It did say C:\Windows and the hard drive IS detected in the bios, but I really think this COULD be a hardware problem.
If you have any suggestions, I'd apreciate it, whether it could be a bad boot sector, etc, or ANYTHING that is fixable via software...If not, that brings me to my next question...
Since this is an old computer and it needs a replacement drive, should he bother going past 80GB? That seemed to be the best deal in price per gigabyte. Also, if I buy an ATA 100/133 compatible drive, will it work on his ATA66 motherboard? I was always under the impression that it would simply conform to the speed of the motherboard IDE interface.
Kurak