Where to begin - hwd. vs. sftwr.?

[Jeff H]

Guys,

A friend's machine (EPoX i845, P4-2.4GHz, 512MB PC2700, Seagate 40GB PATA, Asus GF3 128MB AGP vid card, LiteOn optical DVD and CD-RW, Thermaltake 400w ps) is exhibiting some abnormal WinXP (SP2) behavior.

After a successful BIOS run through the XP splash screen scrolls through 40 - 50 of the bars before it boots to Windows. At this point it goes to chkdsk and then gets into a loop of identifying every "file record segment" as unreadable.

If I do a safe mode boot it hangs after the agp440.sys file, regardless of which safe mode I choose.

If you had to guess would you say this is a bad HD or a hosed XP install? I have an Acronis TI image of the drive, but I don't know if it was imaged with the checkmark such that the MBR "came with it." So, I don't want to resort to that until I've exhausted my other options.

The XP install is from an OEM disk. Do I need his exact disk to do a repair install, or can I do it from another OEM CD? Any other suggestions will be gladly accepted <g>.

TIA,

Jeff

 

[imported_miahallen]

You can do the re-install from another OEM disk, if the windows version (like if they're both w/sp2) is the same (just use his CD-Key). No ideas on the problem though.

 

[Dahak]

no, you can use any oem xp home cd to do a repair install with. as long as it is oem the key will be accepted.
Id go to UBCD and download and burn that off and run the hard drive diagnostics that would be approriate for his brand of hard drive.
Would not hurt to run a memory test as well.

Aslso what you can do is boot off the xp cd and go to the recovery console and run a chkdsk /r /p and have it check the drive and see if it boots any better.

If not then you could try a repair install

 

[ShadowBlade]

had the same problem on a non-boot disk....

Turns out an optical drive I had been copying A LOT of stuff with was sh!t and there were fragmented files all over the place, so I defragmented and it corrupted the partition table

Boot from any windows install CD into the command prompt and try to access the drive. If you get anything like "CRC error" or "Cyclic Redundancy Check Error" the same thing has happened to you

 

[Jeff H]

Thanks to all of you that responded. I d/l'ed the UBCD and ran the quick drive test, it was a green light. I ran the system memory test, and a green light there. I'm now running the full HD diagnostic and w/ only 7% complete I'm getting errors.

This is tentatively looking like a HD issue. I'll let you know what the balance of the drive test tells me.

Jeff

 

[SparkyJJO]

sounds like HD to me