perhaps hard disk problem? help meeeeee!!!

[DanRoy]

my pc would not boot, saying the file system32\drivers\pci.sys is missing or corrupt. I got it to boot, maybe by using the winXP CD. I try to run checkdisk and it won't run, saying "the application or DLL C:\WINDOWS\system32\UNTFS.dll is not a valid Windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette." I did get checkdisk to run partially once and it said certain file sectors (?) or something were unreadable. also some files on my hard drive have seemed to mysteriously dissapear. I scanned with symantec antivirus, with the updated reference file, and no viruses were found. what's wrong with my computer?

thanks!
dan

 

[DanRoy]

the hard drive is probably a year old, it's a 120GB, don't remember brand or model. I put it in when my old hard drive seemingly failed :-(

 

[DanRoy]

.

 

[FrequencyX]

You are kindof of running out of options at this point .. I am assuming you used a recovery console cd to try chkdsk ? You may want to start thinking about formatting and reinstalling windows at this point..

 

[DanRoy]

so you think it's not a physical error in the hard drive? i could just fix it with a format?

 

[FrequencyX]

That would be my guess .. That error is one of many that you will get when the OS is corrupted.

 

[DanRoy]

what would have caused this corruption in the OS if not a virus or a physical failure in the disk?

here are some more details: when chkdsk runs on startup, it reports "file record segment 17xxxx is unreadable" several dozen times, then goes into "chkdsk is verifying indexes", at which point it always freezes at 3% complete.

thanks for the help

 

[jterrell]

You might look up repairing MBR by google search and see if any of that helps.

 

[FrequencyX]

Originally posted by: DanRoy
what would have caused this corruption in the OS if not a virus or a physical failure in the disk?

here are some more details: when chkdsk runs on startup, it reports "file record segment 17xxxx is unreadable" several dozen times, then goes into "chkdsk is verifying indexes", at which point it always freezes at 3% complete.

thanks for the help

This is not a Boot record problem, if there was a corrupted boot sector he wouldn't have gotten this far in the loading process.

There is a chance that the Harddisk is failed, but I wouldn't assume that untill you format the disk out and try to reinstall windows. Even if a hard disk has bad sectors the hard disk will still run . It just marks them as bad and do not use them and skips right over them.

 

[DanRoy]

well I seem to have lost multiple gigabytes worth of files, and I don't think I could trust a hard drive that does this to be reliable in the future.

it's a western digital caviar special edition, with a 3 year warranty, so maybe they will replace it for me