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Could the hard drive be the problem?

H

Hardball

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2002
Messages
175
Hi all-- My computer had been running fine until yesterday. It was used yesterday morning and turned off, and then turned on later in the afternoon. When it was turned on it could not boot into Windows. It gets to the point where the devices are listed, but at the bottom of the screen it has "a disk read error occured, press ctrl-alt-del to restart". Rebooting, even multiple times does nothing to change this as it can't get past this point.

I created a bootable cd with the Western Digital diagnostics program on it and tested, and everything passed, no errors. I then tried to get into the Recovery Console by booting from the XP Home setup disk, but at the point where it says "Setup is inspecting your computers hardware configuration", it hangs and goes to a black screen. So I can't access the recovery console. I am currently running Memtest86+ from Ultimate Boot Disk, and no errors so far. The WD 160GB IDE hard drive is about 2.5 to 3 years old and has shown no signs of any issues up to this point. There have been no hardware changes or software issues. Any ideas as to what I can try to fix this without having to lose all my data with a full format and reinstall of XP?
 
Perhaps the hard drive has a "sticky head", so that when you turn it off, and then later turn it on, it can't unpark?

I am not sure if a SMART monitoring utility can tell you if this is the case - your hdd model may not have SMART. Although if the drive was manufactured 2-3 years ago I would think it should have it.

BTW when you ran the WD diagnostic, did you do a full read scan of all sectors?
 
Could just mean the boot manager/boot loader got corrupted somehow. If you boot from a DOS disk or USB stick, can you access the drive? Is the data still there? Maybe use GParted and see if the drive is accessible?
 
Forceman- What do you mean booting from a DOS disk or USB stick? Can you give me an example on those? I tried to boot from the XP Setup CD, but it hangs at the "setup is inspecting your computers hardware configuration" prompt. I was able to use the Ultimate Boot Disk and to use some of the tools on there. The GParted utility you mentioned was on there and I tried it, but I'm not sure how to check with it to see if the drive is accessible. I was able to see the files that are on my hard drive, but I'm not sure how to check to see if the drive is accessible with that program. I'm not familiar with GParted as I've never used it before tonight. It did show SMART results passed and the Western Digital diagnostics showed no errors.
 
If you can see that the files are still there using something else, then there is no real reason to make a bootable USB - I was just trying to think of a way to make sure the data was intact (which might just mean a corrupted OS, and not a physical disc error).
 
Is there a workaround if it's a corrupted OS? Can the data on that drive be retrieved if the OS is corrupted?
 
If you have another drive to use, you can always install the OS to that one, then copy the files over. Normally, with XP, you would just do a repair (or overlay) install on top of the existing data and it should fix the OS problems, but if that isn't working you might need to use a different disk.
 
I've kind of done that with the Ultimate Boot Disk I made. What do you mean as far as checking the drive status? I have managed to test the drive with the WD Diagnostics tests and it came back with no errors or problems and another utility showed the SMART status as good on the drive. Is that what you mean as far as drive staus?
 
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