I/O Disk Error

[joepalm]

I have been away on holiday for a week and when I returned home and downloaded my email (I had about 40 messages) the computer froze after about 30 email downloads. I had to use control-alt-delete and when I restarted I got disk I/O error. I shut down again and it now reports no Operating System Found.

Thanks

JP

 

[garebo]

Well, it often means your hard drive died, sorry to say.
But, can you get into your bios and see if you have s.m.a.r.t drive enabled? If so it will give you an error message when the first screen comes up, before the error message. If you see the smart drive message telling you there is a problem with your hard drive, then you know for sure its likely toast. But you can still get the hard drive diagnostic program from the hard drive mfgr and test the drive out in dos using a win98 boot disk and then swapping the diagnostic program in its place.

Or, take the hard drive out and slave it to another system, see if the other system will see it or not.

Sorry to report bad news.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[garebo]

By the way, is your system on a UPS? Was there a heavy rain or storm in your area the last week? IF there was and you dont use a UPS that could be your answer.
Course it could simply be that the hard drive failed and nothing else.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[BadBigBen]

Or it could be that you have been hit by a Virus...

Similar thing happened to me, while I was browsing the Internet... System Shutdown, and upon reboot it told me that same exact thing... what the Virus/worm had done, was reconfigure the HD in the BIOS to another one and different size, I only noticed this as I was preparing to do a TOTAL Fresh Install and wondered why my HD wasn't listed correctly...

I suggest, you follow your Mobo Manufacturers Handbook, about Clearing the CMOS... and then try rebooting the system...

if it works, then run all the AntiVirus Software(or TrendMicro Housecall over the Internet), AntiMal/Spyware software (SpyBot,AdAware and MS AntiSpy, in combo), and AntiTrojan Software(Ewido) that you have, or can get a hold of...

Trend and Panda Online Scanner:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/activescan/com/activescan_principal.htm

Ewido:

http://www.ewido.net/en/

Hope this helps...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[mainegeek]

joepalm,
It may be something as simple as the cmos battery as well.
Try running auto detection for the hard drive from with in the bios to see if it detects the harddrive.

If it does and you continue to get the No OS Found at boot then I would suspect the file store to be corrupt either from a boot sector virus or damaged sectors on the drive.

A weak or failing power supply may be the culprit as well.

 

[joepalm]

Thanks for replies, just got my computer backup and running. The hard disk had failed as suggested.

Thanks again JP