Dead Harddrive?

[laxman04]

Hi everyone.
Today i started up my system and everything booted normally, then once it reached the windows screen with the loading bar running across it, the computer froze with a black screen. Now i can't get past this. My computer has been running stabily for quite a while, and my hard drive is a few years old so that is what i think died. Any ideas on what the problem could be?

My system:
Pentium D 805 OC to 3.8
Asus P5ND2-sli
2 6600 gts in sli
1 gig pqi turbo ram
480 antec power supply
old maxtor hardrive (pata)

 

[evongugg]

If it's not the hard drive, you may have a bad motherboard.
Test the hard drive with some diagnostic program, like Drive Fitness Test from Hitachi. If it fails the SMART test, replace the drive.
Thanks.

 

[laxman04]

Thanks for the responses guys.
I tried booting into safe mode and that didn't work either. I also used my old motherboard and processor and tried to boot from that and i had the same problem. I guess i'll be buyin a new hard drive.

 

[Human1]

Open the hard drive up and blow on the discs to make sure there's no dust on them.
No, don't do that. Does sound like a corruption of some type, though. I also vote for the repair install.

 

[yeason]

Get into recovery console and run (I think, someone correct me if wrong) chkdsk /F, or you can try scandisk. Either of these will check the drive for errors, corrupt sectors, or surface problems, sometimes windows even works right and fixes itself (by fixing the bad sectors). The other thing you could try it to put it into another computer and have that computer run full disk check on it.

Hope you can recover your stuff & maybe your drive too! Dead HDD's suck .

 

[Spiv]

I also vote for the recovery console and/or safemode.

You could also try not overclocking

 

[yeason]

you don't have to go dirrectly to the recovery console. Just run it like you doing a fresh install. the system will see you have windows already installed. Then it will ask if you want to do a recovery. Tell it yes and it will go through and reinstall the vital parts of windows without looseing anything you have on the drive.

Yes and no. It will reinstall windows but you'll also loose all of the program "links". Basically they still exist in the programs folder but they wont be on the start menu or in the registry, it will be as if they were never installed so one would have to go through and reinstall most of them. At least that is my experiance with recovery installs. I'd prefer to try recovery console before I tried a recovery install.