cant load windows

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben
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Ben

my laptop has given up the ghost, i think? when i turn it
on i get a mesage say somthing like " smart hard disc
failure iminant back up your files and replace your hard
drive press f1 to continue" so i push f1 and it goes to
the safe mode options screen. if i select start normally
it gets stuck on the black xp loading screen and the green
bar just scrols and scrols. if i choose safe mode it gets
to the pasword screen and thinks and thinks. could it be a
virous or is it just dead?
Thanks for any advice
Ben
 
The SMART warning indicates a failing hard drive. The link here is intended
to give you information about SMART
http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/158/

If you have data on the drive that you need to copy off you had best do that
now. BTW you can replace hard drives so don't throw the laptop out.
 
Hi Harry,
Good way to check the condition of your harddisk is boot to recovery
console using your Xp installation CD. In the command prompt that you would
see type in
chkdsk /p /r and hit enter . This command checks and tries to repair the bad
sectors on the HDD. If you recieve an error "one or more unrecoverable
problems on the volumes" the HDD is damaged. This comes when the HDD has
5-10% of bad sectors of the total space.
If the checkdisk command is able to fix the bad sectors on the command
promt you can try this article from the Microsoft website
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545&Product=winxp
In cases like these there is a possibility of data loss because when the
chkdsk repairs the bad sectors the data that were in these sectors may be
erased.
More help mail me at (e-mail address removed)
Good Luck!


Harry Ohrn said:
The SMART warning indicates a failing hard drive. The link here is intended
to give you information about SMART
http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/158/

If you have data on the drive that you need to copy off you had best do that
now. BTW you can replace hard drives so don't throw the laptop out.
--

Harry Ohrn MS-MVP [Shell/User]
www.webtree.ca/windowsxp


Ben said:
my laptop has given up the ghost, i think? when i turn it
on i get a mesage say somthing like " smart hard disc
failure iminant back up your files and replace your hard
drive press f1 to continue" so i push f1 and it goes to
the safe mode options screen. if i select start normally
it gets stuck on the black xp loading screen and the green
bar just scrols and scrols. if i choose safe mode it gets
to the pasword screen and thinks and thinks. could it be a
virous or is it just dead?
Thanks for any advice
Ben
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Hi Harry,
Good way to check the condition of your harddisk is boot to recovery
console using your Xp installation CD. In the command prompt that you would
see type in
chkdsk /p /r and hit enter . This command checks and tries to repair the bad
sectors on the HDD. If you recieve an error "one or more unrecoverable
problems on the volumes" the HDD is damaged. This comes when the HDD has
5-10% of bad sectors of the total space.
If the checkdisk command is able to fix the bad sectors on the command
promt you can try this article from the Microsoft website
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545&Product=winxp
In cases like these there is a possibility of data loss because when the
chkdsk repairs the bad sectors the data that were in these sectors may be
erased.
More help mail me at (e-mail address removed)
Good Luck!
Click to expand...

Good points but the way that hard drives are setup nowadays, if bad
clusters start showing up after using disk tools - the disks are pretty
much history. Unfortunately, I've also found SMART warnings to be very
accurate.
 
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