Strange issue accessing Dell Inspiron (Vista 32 bit OS) – out of ideas

[ITGuyLA]

A customer brought in Dell Inspiron laptop with Vista on it. She said that she installed some update and the system would not start.

Here is what happens: when computer is powered on, it goes through POST and then displays green loading toolbar and then gets stuck at that point. So, I tried to go into safe mode, it shows the list of files being loaded but when it gets to crcdisk.sys it freezes. At this point I went on google and found some info that this could be caused by hard disk problems, so I put hiren?s BootCD (ver 10) and ran disk check with HDD Regenerator. After 1.5 hour scan it did not find any problems. My third step was to boot from Dell Recovery DVD that came with laptop, and here is what happened: it copies some files to hard drive, then says that it is starting windows, and then it goes to completely black screen and freezes.

At that point, I pull out hard drive, and put it into SATA to USB cradle (dock station) that is connected to the testing station running Windows XP, I see that it read the folder list on the drive, but when I click on any folder on that drive, the testing Windows Explorer freezes (that is on the clean, testing system!). Ok, I am thinking, maybe there is a problem with the cradle, so I try connecting it directly to the testing system motherboard via SATA cable, now it does not even read the drive.

I asked other tech (we work for small computer repair company) what he thinks, he said that the hard drive may have a corrupted file structure and that we need to run check disk on it from Windows, and that HDD Regenerator only looked for physical damage and did not find it. But how can I run check disk (chkdsk) on it if it freezes the moment I click on the drive?

Any thoughts on how to proceed from here would be appreciated.

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I dont know how much the customer is paying per hour but I probably wouldn't waste too much more time on it and just buy a new hard drive. If there is no data on it that needs to be saved I would run Dariks Boot and Nuke on it then try to reload the OS. If you have a Dell resource CD you could boot to that and run the diagnostics and that should tell you if there is a problem with the hardware.

Beyond that, it might just be time for another hard drive. Especially if it is on a laptop which tends to get knocked around a lot more than a desktop would.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[goombawaho]

You're kind of dancing around a true diagnosis. I would have booted with the Ultimate Boot CD and ran the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostic utility AND/OR used the built-in Dell diagnostic partition (if it will boot to that) and ran the Express Test and then maybe the hard drive specific test.

Either of those should give you a definitive answer on the viability of the hard drive.

 

[kjv1611]

ITGuyLA,

If the drive is causing another system to freeze up, it's pretty definitely the hardware. So much so that I doubt it's worth checking further. Advise the customer, find out their budget for the hardware, get it, and move on. The more you mess with this drive, the more improbable any data recovery is going to be.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[G0AOZ]

If time is not of the essence here, then try making an image of the drive by booting up from say, an Acronis CD. How about booting up on a floppy disk and running MHDD or Spinrite on it.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[BadBigBen]

Windows 7 & Vista - Running Checkdisk from a Boot CD/DVD

http://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=6565

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[chrislg987]

It sounds like you may have a bad hard drive. Does the hard drive make any noise when it is trying to be read? You may try the diagnostic dell cd, internal diagnostic on the dell system, run hiren or ultimate cd tools for diagnostic, or go to the hard drive manufacturer website and get the diagnostic iso to run a test on the hard drive. Have you tried connecting the drive externally to a Mac or Linux system. Sometimes when my files are locked by windows, I can run some terminal commands from my Mac to unlock them. But it sounds like you may have a bad Hard drive.