This is what happened immediate below I couldn't boot the drive:
I was running a Norton virus scan when the computer froze and I heard a
clicking noise. I then held the power button to turn the computer off. The
next day, I couldn't boot to my newer drive, so I changed the BIOS to boot
from my older hard drive. I'll follow your suggestions and see what happends.
The weird thing is yesterday I wasn't able to boot to my old hard drive,
which is the good one. I changed the BIOS to boot from the newer drive with
the corrupted system file out of panic, and it booted to the ...GOOD drive.
Very odd.
If you have clicking, you have a drive hardware failure - like perhaps
a bad spot on a platter. The clicking is repeated attempts to try to
read the area until whatever is trying to do whatever it is trying to
do finally gives up and crashes,. reports it, skips it or moves on.
You will probably never "fix" it if it is a media (platter) or
mechanical issue. Clicking is usually going to be a physical problem
- not a software or XP problem.
You may be able to get a program from your HDD manufacturer that can
diagnose the entire drive, mark the bad area as totally unusable and
it will never be looked at again by any program. Maybe. The down
side is such diagnostics sometimes need to wipe out all the data on
the drive to do the test and a thorough test will take a long time.
Even if the test finds something and implements some fix, I would
consider the drive suspicious forever. The test may just say the
drive cannot be fixed and you have still lost all your data. It may
not find anything and you still lost your data, but clicking is not
good. So, check with the HDD manufacturer (they may have a forum for
support) and see what they say. XP is not causing your clicking.
Sometimes you can try some tools from the HDD manufacturer WWW site.
You may have to just cut your loses and make the drive some kind of
non critical secondary. It might last a long time in that capacity,
but it is not something you would want to depend on. Someday it will
not work at all. You need it to be used in some capacity that if it
totally fails some day, it is just an annoyance and not a catastrophe.
I have a clicker too, but if it poops out on me one day, I really
don't care since I don't use it for anything except quick access to a
bunch of PDFs I have stored on some other permanent media. It keeps
me from using FTP all the time for file transfers. If it becomes
totally unaccessible (and I expect it will someday), I would most
certainly curse it and then maybe replace it, but I don't have to have
it.
Anytime you use the power button, if something goes haywire, chkdsk /r
can sometimes fix it because the problem is not a physical defect, it
is a file allocation table or a journal problem and that something
chkdsk can sometimes fix.
If there is a power button in the past history on some afflicted
system that I see, I am not going to do anything until I run chkdsk /r
from Recovery Console on it first.
You still have not said if you have booted RC and run chkdsk /r on
your HDDs. Are you not doing that on purpose, you did it and things
are fine now, you did it, it all looks good and you still can't boot
or what...
