Hard Drive Failing?

leapingfrog0

Senior member
Aug 25, 2001
227
0
0
Hi Guys,

I'm having problems with a computer and I'm trying to determine if the hard drive is failing. I ran WD's diagnostic utilities (quick and full scans) and the test came back without any errors, yet I'm still having problems that seem like they could be hard drive related.

These are the problems I'm having:

- A month ago, the registry was corrupt and the system would not boot. I used BartPE to copy / paste some registry backups from Window's System Restore directory (/_restore/) into /windows/system32/config. That fixed the problem and the computer booted fine. After I finished, I went into the Windows Recovery Console and ran chkdsk and followed up with "fixboot" and "fixmbr". Everything was working fine.

- Now, last week I turned on the computer and received a boot disk error, where the system could not find the operating system. I turned off the computer and rebooted and the system worked again.

- Now, the system locks up during bootup... just a black screen. When I go into safe mode, the system still halts last loading "mup.sys". I ran "chkdsk /r" in the recovery console, rebooted, and the system still locks up.

It seems like this computer is having some file integrity issues. What would cause this? I'm pretty sure I can fix it, but I'm afraid when I do, the problems will happen again, which is why I want to find the root of the problem. Is it the hard drive? Can it be the motherboard? Do SATA drives have file issues I don't know about?

The computer is an HP a1600n with a 200GB SATA hard drive running Windows XP.

Any help/ideas would are appreciated.

Thanks,
Andrew
 

NoelS

Senior member
Oct 5, 2007
566
0
0
leapingfrog,

Since you had some registry corruption issues previously, and you seemed to repair it with some piecemeal cut and paste, I'd think you are continuing to have registry problems. 2 solutions: First would be to do a clean re-install of Windows and second would be to do a repair install of Windows. The second will, of course, keep your program registrations and settings, but the first would be a new start. I think I'd try the repair install first, then if you're not happy with results, go for the clean install.

BTW, 'm sure you know, the repair install starts with putting the Windows CD in the CD tray and going for a regular clean install, BUT then selecting the R the SECOND time it comes up during install. Don't select the R for Recovery Console, but the next (second) R...

Good luck,

Noel
 

boomdawg

Member
Jul 21, 2005
78
0
0
Run a SMART drive test on your HD from the BIOS. Failing = bad drive. If you run the extended and it passes the drive is probably fine. If it's fine then see NoelS's post
 

Arcanedeath

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2000
2,822
1
76
This appears to be a data coruption issue so you may also want to run memtest 86 1.7+ to see if that may be causing the issue.
 

Laputa

Golden Member
Jan 18, 2000
1,775
0
0
It's your drive. There are excessive bad sectors that the smart growth defect list can no longer hold. Just replace the drive.