Crash, bang, boom

S

Skinandbones

Guest
I've been searching for the answer to no avail. My computer has been running just fine for my wife while I was gone for 3 months since a clean install of XP Pro and because of my return home (no other explaination can be had) the computer decided it was enough of a good thing. The wife was going on-line (MSN dial-up) and received an error along the lines of "unable to access remote ......." (that's all she remembers) and the computer locked up. She tried the escape key and Ctrl Alt Del and neither did anything. So she killed the power to the computer (on surge suppressor) and then restored power. When she pushed the power on the computer, nothing happened. This is the point where I came in to see what was happening. The HD light was on, but the computer didn't respond to the power button. I killed the power again and waited 30 seconds and restarted. The initial boot screen came so I thought it was OK, but the screen before the Window's booting screen stopped after "Verifying DMI Pool data" longer than usual and then I received "Disk error""Press any key to restart". I'm thinking my harddrive just died. I tried booting off the XP CD and run recovery console (damned if I didn't install it, so that didn't work), but I rebooted to the XP CD again and ran a Repair. Seemed to be working, loading all the various files and then it said to restart the computer. That resulted in a repeat of booting off the XP CD, asking to do a repair and loading the same files again so apparently that wasn't working. Next, I tried booting off an ME startup disk and at the DOS prompt, ran Scandisk. It found 2 probs, I believe it was "The physical size of Drive C differs from reported something or other and a different variation where something else didn't match up with something else as it was supposed to. I let Scandisk fix the two problems and began a surface scan. At about 50% I decided that was enough (1 hour later) as it hadn't found anything wrong on the used sectors so I exited the surface scan. I restarted the computer booting off the HD (thinking scan disk fixed the problem), but was faced with "NTLDR Missing" during boot.
Am I screwed at this point and having to reformat and reinstall XP or is there something I'm doing wrong or not doing that I should be? Is MSN a known terrorizer of computers (because I've had more minor troubles with MSN as the kick off or the actual problem now than any other application. Any help is greatly appreciated. Please email me bullinger@mtwhitney.navy.mil if you would as I'm really in a hurry to fix this problem.

Specs:
DFI AK-74EC MB
512 Meg PC133 RAM
20 Gig WD ATA 100 HD
Hercule's Prophet 4500 64m Video
Hercule's Muse XL Sound

Nothing has been installed or changed in 3 months
 
Just a quick question, when you did repair install then rebooted did you change the boot back to HD, to stop it loading the boot CD?
Also shouldn't have to have recovery console previously installed it should run from the CD
 

Members online

No members online now.

Latest profile posts

Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
Xie wrote on Electronic Punk's profile.
Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
Electronic Punk wrote on Sazar's profile.
Rest in peace my friend, been trying to find you and finally did in the worst way imaginable.

Forum statistics

Threads
62,015
Messages
673,494
Members
5,621
Latest member
naeemsafi
Back