Harddrive Read Error

[StephensLM]

My computer (Dell Inspiron 6000) had been working fine, but this morning when I woke up, my computer was glaring back at me with the blue screen of death. It told me that I had a disk read error! The night before, I had ran the disk defrag, and apparently this caused an issue.. I tried the Dell system scan on the harddrive, but it always came up with a message saying that the harddrive had a read error.

I can not even load up windows xp. It gets to the loading screen, and then goes back to the blue screen. Is there anything I can do? It tells me to run a command in DOS, but I can not even access DOS..

 

[StephensLM]

Is there a way to get to DOS with my current problem?

 

[Nelviticus]

If you go to

http://www.bootdisk.com

you can download bootable floppy images which should get you to a DOS prompt.

Nelviticus

 

[wahnula]

Have you tried Safe Mode (F8 during boot)? One other option would be to run a Linux Live CD like Knoppix or Puppy to see if you can view your files for export to another disk or thumb drive, just in case the disk is going bye-bye.

Booting to the XP CD and running chkdsk /r from the Recovery Console:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

Best of luck...

Tony

"Buy what you like, or you'll be forced to like what you buy"...me

 

[yourpc]

Have you got it fixed yet? If not, you may have a corrupt registry. There are step by step instructions that Ive used to fix the registry from the system restore folder on my drive. Theres more than one way to do this but heres a couple of them.

http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5362

http://www.icompute.info/System_restore_from_xp_cd.htm

I hope this helps.

 

[TheMacgyver]

5. At the Recovery Console command prompt, type the following lines, pressing ENTER after you type each line:
md tmp
copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\sam c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\security c:\windows\tmp\security.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\default c:\windows\tmp\default.bak

delete c:\windows\system32\config\system
delete c:\windows\system32\config\software
delete c:\windows\system32\config\sam
delete c:\windows\system32\config\security
delete c:\windows\system32\config\default

copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system
copy c:\windows\repair\software c:\windows\system32\config\software
copy c:\windows\repair\sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam
copy c:\windows\repair\security c:\windows\system32\config\security
copy c:\windows\repair\default c:\windows\system32\config\default

6. Type exit to quit Recovery Console. Your computer will restart.

 

[TheMacgyver]

I wood do jest the SYSTEM file first, reboot, and see from there. You don't want reset everything if you don't have to.

At that point system restore may work to a better date.