MAJOR Hard Drive failure

Lukas

Real Name No Gimmicks
Joined
30 Jan 2002
Messages
421
Hi all,


A few hours ago I was a happy young man, shooting Terrorists and rescueing hostages on Counter-Strike... And then my pc rebooted. Just like that, no bluescreen whatsoever (option to automatically reboot on BSOD is delected on my system). Actually pc didn't reboot in the full meaning of the word. It went down.

I had a look in the BIOS and the first thing I noticed was a higher system and proc temperature. System was about 45° and proc about 65° (those values arent out of the ordinary, but they are higher then the usual values on my system)

BIOS still detected my HD's and DVD/CD drives so I opened up the hood, and switched it off for about 30 mins to cool it off.

After half hour I tried again:

"Windows cannot start becouse the file c:\windows\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted"

Well, thats a piece of cake right? Boot from CD and hit "R" for recovery console, right? Wrong. Recovery console coudn't find the XP installation that I wanted to log on to.

I tried booting again, and I got stuck looking at a black screen right after OS selection. (Multiboot, XP & 2000)

After that I tried Win 2000 and it booted fine.

I am running CHDSK now.... and all I get is this:

File record segment [number] is unreadable

[number] started @ 211 and its gone past 40333.




The second partition cannot start CHKDSK with error:
'Unreadable master file table. CHKDSK aborted'


Does it mean that:

a. the disk is dead
b. the disk isnt dead, but the files on it



Anyways, what coud couse this kind of failure?
I didn't check with Maxtor yet, but how about warranty? (the disk is less then 6 months old)


Please help.


Greetz

Lukas
 
wow...seems like you did a good job of troubleshooting it. I would recommend you put that drive as a slave on a different system and get the important stuff out of it. Then, try to boot again. Maybe the hard drive got too hot and pissed off at you. Well then, if you possitively dont want to format, I would try instaling windows over itself. Other than that, that drive might be toast.
 
reading over your post again, It seems like the file table in the XP partition took a dump. It probably is useless, might have to format (after taking the good stuff out using the 2k partition).
 
So the disk isn't actually dead? Only the files on it?


thnx 4 your help.


Greetz

Lukas
 
If you're a bit waahhaay you should be able to save what you need off the messed up HDD.

Use a proggy called GetDataBack from www.runtime.org/gdb.htm .

I used it when my HDD wen BAD and it allowed me (thankfully!) to save all my important files.
 
You repaired the wrong way. You don't press R the first time. You choose to install Windows. When it shows the installation(s) in a list, choose the first (and only). It will ask if you want to repair. HERE your repair.
 
lukas, first count on just the file system getting damaged. then later if you find out it's teh hd itself, then go from ther. but first try to get your stuff off it, do a 0-wipe, and format it.

your cpu temp seems awful high. there's a chance the system could have crashed from the high temps during which xp was performing one of it's many small background services/processes. thus the corrupted file(s).
 
well, no one has mentioned the powermax test tool from Maxtor. theres a good chance the advanced test will pick up and repair the error for you. then chkdsk will be able to complete its job. I was susprised 2 days ago when it repaired what i thought was a knackerd drive, didnt lose a file either :)
 

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