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Hard Drive Fried?

P

Playmaker

Golden Member
I have an Epox 8K7A mobo with an AMD T-Bird 1.2ghz and a 40gb IBM Deskstar 7200rpm hard drive. I bought everything about a year and a half ago and it has all worked fine up until now. While watching a video file I received a blue screen. After that I get a blue screen everytime I turn on my computer when I get to the first Windows XP screen with the bar going across the bottom. I get various errors in the blue screen like "BAD_POOL_DATA" and other stuff similar to that. I was still able to boot from my WinXP CD so I reformatted, was able to get all the install files copied, but then received the same blue screen during the install. Also, I can no longer boot from my floppy drive. When I went into WinXP recovery thru the WinXP disk I used the "CHKDSK" command and it said it has "unrecoverable errors."

This most likely means my hard drive is fried, correct? I want to make sure it's the hard drive and not the motherboard before I buy new parts, but I have no way to be sure besides asking here for other opinions. Unfortunately I am a matter of months past my 1 year warranty on the hard drive. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
I am one of the few users who managed to knacker their IBM drive themselves....many fail on their own....it may be that you have fallen victim to the Deathstar 75GXP or 60GXP....they are improving nowadays but they still have their reputation of failure....they are not alone though, they just have a much higer failure rate than others.

I would order that new hard drive.....

Western Digital: Fast 8mb cache SE editions are good
Maxtor: quick and silent....
Seagate: good value without sacrificing the performence.

Once you have installed Windows XP on the new drive you can try popping the old one in and formatting using disk management.....if it has corrupt sectors....should still be able to use it....if it is indeed a mechanical fault then you will know because you will get errors or lockups which will be a sign to take it back out! Even if it isn't the hard drive at least you now have more space....if you got a new motherboard and it turned out the old one was fine.....well, you can't have 2 motherboards 😉

Corm
 
Download Drive Fitness Test from here and run it.
It'll tell you if the drive is bad. If not, then do low-level format or
it's also called write 0's to the drive.

EDIT: download it on a working machine and create
a bootable utility disk with that program.
Take that disk to the one with the problem and
boot from it.
 
I'll give that a try. The AMD 761 chipset and my 1.2ghz cpu are getting a little dated with the latest games (1.5 years old), so I think it's time for a new computer anyway. I want to give this one to my brother, so I plan on buying a small WD (like 20gig) and giving that a try. If that doesn't work and it is the mobo I think Epox has pretty good customer service, so maybe I can get a refund that way.

I believe it is a 75GXP, can't really remember. I have formatted it once by booting from the WinXP disk. That didn't fix the error. Would reformatting it on another computer with WinXP installed using disk management change anything? or do you all think this is most likely a mechanical error and the drive is dead? Darn 1 year warranty =( The reason I ask is because I will order a hard drive with my new computer, and had also planned on ordering a hard drive for this computer so my brother can still use it. However, if the drive can still be made to work I'd rather save the money. What are my chances that the drive is or is not completely gone?

Finally, that boot disk thing won't work, I can no longer boot from my floppy drive, but I can boot from my CD drive for some reason. Any more info would be greatly appreciated, I can't do anything until Saturday night when I get home from college anyway...
 
If you have access to any other computer, pull the drive and put it in the computer with a functioning floppy. Disconnect the working drive in that computer, boot from the DFT floppy (see above).
You will get a report on your drive, and can move forward from there. Even if it won't boot into an OS, you may be able to use a second computer to recover your data.
 
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