Problem with XP Home

[Hardball]

Hi all-- My computer had been running fine until yesterday. It was used yesterday morning and turned off, and then turned on later in the afternoon. When it was turned on it could not boot into Windows. It gets to the point where the devices are listed, but at the bottom of the screen it has "a disk read error occured, press ctrl-alt-del to restart". Rebooting, even multiple times does nothing to change this as it can't get past this point.

I created a bootable cd with the Western Digital diagnostics program on it and tested, and everything passed, no errors. I then tried to get into the Recovery Console by booting from the XP Home setup disk, but at the point where it says "Setup is inspecting your computers hardware configuration", it hangs and goes to a black screen. So I can't access the recovery console. I am currently running Memtest86+ from Ultimate Boot Disk, and no errors so far. The WD 160GB IDE hard drive is about 2.5 to 3 years old and has shown no signs of any issues up to this point. There have been no hardware changes or software issues. Any ideas as to what I can try to fix this without having to lose all my data with a full format and reinstall of XP?

 

[C1]

I think that Ive had a couple cases like this which I fixed by connecting the drive to another windows system and running a scan disk with fix errors option. Worth a try and it shouldnt hurt anything. At least you'll get another analysis data point.

 

[Hardball]

C1- I have an open IDE2 connector on the motherboard in another computer, so I would just connect the problem drive to that and see if I could then access the contents from there and attempt to repair it that way?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, definitely slave the drive to another system, and see if you can access and back-up your data.

Then put it back in the original system, and run WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (bootable), and do a surface scan, write zeros, and then another surface scan.

Then do a re-format/re-install of the OS.

 

[Hardball]

VirtualLarry- I don't think I can slave it in the other system as the drive in the other system is SATA and this problem drive is IDE. In the other system the problem drive would be set to master?? as it would be the only device on IDE2 port and IDE1 has a dvd burner as master and a dvd rom as slave. Would this still work with the above listed setup?

 

[ViRGE]

VirtualLarry- I don't think I can slave it in the other system as the drive in the other system is SATA and this problem drive is IDE. In the other system the problem drive would be set to master?? as it would be the only device on IDE2 port and IDE1 has a dvd burner as master and a dvd rom as slave. Would this still work with the above listed setup?

You would need to make sure your malfunctioning IDE drive is set to master if there's nothing else on the channel, but at the end of the day this will work one way or another.

 

[Hardball]

Update: I have decided to get a new hard drive to remedy this problem. My question now is regarding what I have to do to the new drive in order to install the OS.

When I installed the previous drive I had made a backup image after I did the fresh install of XP Home. I used Drive Image XML to make the image. Do I still need to format and partition the new hard drive in order to restore the image I have, or is that already incorporated into the image file of XP Home that I have from Drive Image XML? I assume I will have to boot from CD and use BartPE or UBCD, both or which have the Drive Image XML plugin, in order to restore the image file to the new hard drive, but do I need to format or partition the new drive prior to doing the image restore?