Bad Sectors - ohh shhhiii....

[rynnor]

Bugger! My main pc will now no longer load windows - a blue screen flashes up (so fast its practically sub-liminal) which I think says something about bad sectors.

Cant boot in safe mode - system disk boot just got me to another blue screen - doh!

Best plan I came up with is to create a brand new HD with XP loaded as primary drive - then re-attach old drive as secondary drive and attempt to fix it from new drive with chkdsk /f or /x.

Hopefully I'll then be able to copy off my essential files and bin the poor old drive whilst kicking myself for not having bought that network backup drive at an earlier date...

 

[Guest]

repair install from your exisiting XP cd (if you have XP installed that is)

failing that run the recovery console and run chkdsk /F to check the hard drive consitency.

you may also want to do a FIXBOOT and FIXMBR command after the chkdsk /F

that should sort it out

sounds like thats a bad sector where some windows files are.

 

[rynnor]

repair install from your exisiting XP cd (if you have XP installed that is)

It is an XP machine (its even a legit copy!) but I didnt get much joy from the xp system disk just another blue screen telling me i should try CHKDSK - lol!

Slightly annoying when thats what I was trying to do

 

[Guest]

so you tried to REPAIR the installation or didnt you get that far, if it borked after that try a reinstall but goto the RECOVERY CONSOLE instead

 

[rynnor]

so you tried to REPAIR the installation or didnt you get that far, if it borked after that try a reinstall but goto the RECOVERY CONSOLE instead

It looks like my win xp system disk isnt bootable - I changed BIOS to boot from CD but it just sits there - the drive light comes on for a while then it stops.

I created a win xp boot cd ages ago - will have a dig around for it...

 

[rynnor]

Hah - once I found the bootable CD it turned out to be the least of my probs - I had a very early SATA motherboard and could I get it to register the SATA drives? - could I hell!

I shoved in a floppy drive from an old pc I had hanging around and did the 'Hit F6 to load other drivers' thing in Windows setup with the latest drivers I could find for my mobo (about 3 years old.. the drivers that is) but no matter how I tried different settings in BIOS I couldnt get it to recognise the hd

So I figured fuck it and bought new motherboard/ram/cpu/graphics card and shoved that in instead

Works perfectly so far and by putting the old SATA drive that caused my original problem in as a secondary drive I was able to fix it enough to get 95% of my data I cared about off of it

BTW if anyone who has a SATA 1 or 150 drive is wondering about compatability with SATA 2 (300) motherboards it works fine.

 

[Kryten]

They do indeed, and theres not even much/any difference in speed for the normal drives. The only speed difference comes from the new tech drives which are SATA2 only.
I've a pair of SATA1 Hitachi 400gb drives in this for general storage, works well. Oddly enough, for 3 year old drives they outperform the 250gb WD I have as my system drive with 16mb cache and all the bells/whistles

Ah well, at least you got yourself an upgrade out of it