So my hard drive failed on me a few nights ago

[SteelAngel]

My system had been running without a hitch until Thursday night when I had to reboot.

Long story short, I went from UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screens to eventually seeing no files on the drive using an XP CD's recovery console. Hooking the drive up to a friend's computer to check it out yielded an empty had drive too. The drive in question is a WD 400 gig model, Caviar line I believe, a little over a year old.

Since this is the first time I've had this kind of hardware failure, I wanted to check to see if I should be aware of anything/do anything special before I go and reinstall Windows and all my applications on it.

 

[SolitoN79]

You should do an integrity test to ensure there aren't any physical problems -- if there are, then reinstalling will be a waste of time...

 

[gse1]

I agree with SolitoN79 that you should check the drive in your friend's PC before using it for a reinstall. I find HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/) to be very useful for things like this, not only will it do a full surface scan but you can bring up the drive's SMART data to see error rates and so forth. Windows' built-in tools will also let you do a full surface scan.

 

[SteelAngel]

I agree with SolitoN79 that you should check the drive in your friend's PC before using it for a reinstall. I find HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/) to be very useful for things like this, not only will it do a full surface scan but you can bring up the drive's SMART data to see error rates and so forth. Windows' built-in tools will also let you do a full surface scan.

Thanks for the link. I did a thorough scan/check/whatever-they-call-it-now-disk on both my and my friend's computer without finding anything major, but that only tells you so much. I'll be sure to try this out later.

 

[Whiznot]

A friend of mine got the unmountable boot drive error message. I installed his drive in my computer. After booting from my boot drive, I ran chkdsk and asked it to correct all errors. A massive volume of errors were corrected. When we put the disk back in the friend's computer everthing worked OK.

 

[rcs2749]

Also boot into the recovery console and run the fixboot command.