hard drive failure ?

soric2

Member
Jul 25, 2001
104
0
0
I have a quick question,
I have a pc that now has started to give me this message.

"general failure reading drive c "
abort,retry,ignore,fail?

I shut down last night and and went to restart this morning, all seemed well windows 98 started to load and then just hung there and after a few mins this message came up.

I think the HD is dead, this is an old pc P2 450 MHZ everything else seemems to work it posts and all.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
83
91
do you hear a clicking sound?

it could be a corrupted windows... the easiest way to tell is to go into the BIOS and see whether or not the BIOS is detecting the hard drive or not.
 

soric2

Member
Jul 25, 2001
104
0
0
the noise I hear are normal HD sounds but they are repeating as if the HD is stuck.

It does show fine in the Bios also.

Should I try and reinstall windows ?
 

soric2

Member
Jul 25, 2001
104
0
0
OK, So I went ahead and tried to reinstall windows and I get as far as scan disc and it says it cannot finish because there is a problem.

it says " scandisk encountered a data error while reading the FAT on drive C "
"This error prevents scandisk from fixing the drive"

those are what it says.
 

airfoil

Golden Member
Jan 17, 2001
1,643
0
0
Why not? If you dont mind losing the data on it, thats the first step to figuring out if the drive has become a goner...
 

WobbleWobble

Diamond Member
Jun 29, 2001
4,867
1
0
Most likely the drive is dead.

What brand is the drive? All manufacturers have their own diagnostic utility. You can also try and zero-fill (low level format) the drive and see if that helps.
 

beatle

Diamond Member
Apr 2, 2001
5,661
5
81
Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
Most likely the drive is dead.

What brand is the drive? All manufacturers have their own diagnostic utility. You can also try and zero-fill (low level format) the drive and see if that helps.

Yeah, definitely run the diagnostics. You can get all of them on the Ultimate Boot CD (a killer resource!)