nevermind

[Epsil0n00]

My friend was having trouble with IE5 acting up last night. So, this morning she ran Norton Disk Doctor and ScanDisk and found that the HDD had 3 bad clusters. Later she called me back and said that the surface scan revealed physical errors that cannot be repaired. Then she said she tried to "run the backup, but then it crashed." I am not quite sure what she means by "the backup" but now it bluescreens on boot.

Does this sound like a dying HDD, or just time for a Windows clean install?

Sorry I don't have more info about what kind of drive and what version of Windows she is running--Any advice you can give me on how to fix her problems would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

PS- What is the best way to find out if this is a hardware problem requiring a new HDD or if its just software? Thanks again!

Epsil0n00
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 🙁

 

[Bojax]

Don't you hate it when your friends find out that you know something about computers and come to you with all their questions...

No, actually i enjoy working on and trouble shooting computers.

What is the hard drive model? most all hard drive manufactures have a diagnostic utility. You'll put it on a bootable disk and run some test on the hard drive. It will tell you if the drive is corupt or not.

 

[ralphmalph]

Friend of a friend type of thing ,huh?
Well,you don't have much info to go on!
If Norton is installed it could be a big hassle to try to restore everything without using Norton because of all that Speedstart, antivirus, etc. stuff.See if she used Norton Backup disks or has Norton system restore or Antivirus disks.If so use those.Or:
You could try to boot with start disk (anyone's start disk OF SAME WINDOWS VERSION will work in anyone's machine if she doen't have one) in "safe mode" and see if you can get to the desktop.Then,
-if Win95 find and copy system.da0 and rename system.dat , find and copy user.da0 and rename user.dat then reboot.
-if Win 98 use start disk get to command prompt type in "scanreg /restore" and when you see files listed like "rb----" just pick one according to the last date shown that you know it was working and restore to it.These rb-- (whatever) files are the registry backups.
-If winME try to get to desktop in safe mode and then find the system restore feature which should show dates you can restore from.
-If Windows other - sorry I don't know!

The bad clusters might be in an area of the disk that contains system files or drivers which may mean you will have to reinstall windows if you are unlucky.If you (or she) is lucky you will be able to get back without that and only lose some odd files or a driver or 2 that you can reinstall.

If you have reinstall or get drastic first see if you can get booted to a command (i.e. dos) prompt with a boot disk.Then if you have experience with dos you can navigate to folders that may contain document,etc. files that she might be able to save to floppy disks.

You could try to just reinstall Windows directly to the disk.
-One more possibility: Put a Different harddrive in the machine as a primary.Put the old one as slave.Install windows to the new one.Then when running save what you can off the old one and redo it.

Good Luck!