hard drive failure ?

[soric2]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[soric2]

Also should I try and totally reformat the drive ?
I guess it wouldnt hurt.

 

[airfoil]

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...

 

[Abhi]

Reformat... and run a full scan...

 

[CraigRT]

drive screwed...

 

[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.

 

[beatle]

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!)