Windows XP Reboot cycle, drive won't mount in Ubuntu

[Indecent]

Hello, thanks so much in advance for helping me. I truly do appreciate it.

My Windows XP computer is stuck in an endless reboot.

I tried going into safe mode and it did the same thing. I then ran Seagate For Dos hard drive diagnostics (it's a Seagate drive), IBM Hitachi Drive fitness test (from Hiren boot cd), and both came back with no problems. No bad sectors, etc.

I have some really important documents on there so the next thing I tried was to use Ubuntu Bootable cd to try to access the drive and save the documents.

when I did this, I received the following error message:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: Inode is corrupt(0):Input/output error
Failed to open $MFT/$BITMAP: Input/output error
Failed to load $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or its a SoftRaid/FakeRaid hardware. In the first case
run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very important! If the
device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate and mount a different device....rest not applicable.

From the error message, I tried running CIA CheckDisk 2.2/NTFS4DOS chkdsk from the Hiren Boot CD, but it just said

"One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommend that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
An unspecified error occurred."

I'm not really sure what to do next or even what could be my problem. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[COLGeek]

Since Ubuntu fails to boot, I suspect a problem with your motherboard (SATA or IDE ports in particular) or your HDDs. Need more details on your system to better diagnose a potential solution. Need make/model of motherboard, memory, CPU, GPU, make/model HDDs, etc.

Is is also possible that your HDD partition table is corrupted. When you ran Hiren, did you have an option to execute a disk check? If so, did you run it?

Please clarify.

 

[Indecent]

Thank you for the response!

If it was a problem with my machine, the drive should be able to be opened on another machine, correct? Or alternatively, if I installed a new OS on a different hard drive and tried running in place of the "failing" drive, it would not work either, correct? These are things I can probably due, but I'm not sure if my conclusions are correct.

Edit: I just remembered I was able to open another SATA drive (the failing drive is SATA as well) in Ubuntu. That should help narrow the problem down.

System specs:
Intel Cor 2 duo E4300, 1809Mhz
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3

nVidia e-GeForce 8500 GT PCI-e
1 GB * 4 DDR2 G Skill Intl ram

Drive in question: Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive

As far as the disk check, I'm not sure what you mean. Can provide a specific program name?

I haven't been trying too many of the tools on the cd as the last time I tried to repair a failing drive I was overconfident and ended up corrupting the drive further. I'm just confident enough in computers to be dangerous, and I'm trying to play this one extra carefully.

thanks again!

 

[COLGeek]

If the motherboard (or ports) is bad, then opening the HDD on another computer should be possible as long as the HDD is not defective.

Will Ubuntu boot all the way to the desktop?

 

[Indecent]

If the motherboard (or ports) is bad, then opening the HDD on another computer should be possible as long as the HDD is not defective.

OK, I will try too.

Will Ubuntu boot all the way to the desktop?

Yes.

Since the drive passed Seagate and IBM DFT I've been advised that running testdisk on a bootable cd could help narrow the problem down or fix it altogether. Any thoughts on how wise using testdisk is? I don't want to do anything that is likely to cause data corruption if it fails.

 

[COLGeek]

Running testdisk should not futher corrupt the disk. Before running it, I would try to mount in another system and copy your files before proceeding....Just in case.

 

[Indecent]

Thank you, that's very good advice.

I appreciate all the help, hopefully it will work in a new machine or testdisk will be able to fix any problems.

Thanks again!