Potential Hard Drive Crash

I was wondering if you could provide some insight into what maybe wrong with my hard drive. Earlier last morning I had a series of power outages while my computer was on. It was connected to a surge protector. I attempted to turn on on my computer the third time this happened while my computer was turned on and the computer did not successfully boot into windows XP. It detects the hard drive on the POST start up screen along with the ram and such and then stays at the Windows XP splash screen with the bar moving under it. I also noticed that my hard drive light on my front of the case stops flickering when at the splash screen.

No errors, or hard drive failures prompts come up during this process or prior it just stays at the splash screen. I have tried running it in safe mode only for it to stop loading the files for it to initialize safe mode. I have also tried the "run windows in the last good configuration" prompt only to have it stuck at the Windows XP splash screen.

I believe that hopefully the windows XP installation on my hard drive was damaged and its not the hard drive itself that has gone bad due to the series of power outages that happened while the computer was turned on.

If you could provide your insight on what maybe wrong with the hard drive and suggest things that I can try in attempt to revive the hard drive. Thanks.

Electronics are susceptible to brownouts too. Your surge suppressor is only good for voltage spikes. You would be better off with a battery backup that would transfer power to battery when the power goes out instead of the computer just shutting down or quickly rebooting.

It sounds like some system files or device drivers got corrupt, but you can't rule out hard drive failure yet. I'm guessing you don't have backups or you would have restored them by now. You can always try a repair install of XP and see if that gets you up and running. Once you get windows running then you can run a tests on the hard drive itself.

Does your hard drive show up in the bios? If not, you can try "load optimized defaults", then reset whatever fields you need to (RAID/AHCI/IDE, boot priority, boot device,...).

This all leads to a dead drive. You may be able to get the data out of it, but I'm thinking when you plug it into another computer or yours as a secondary you will get a "drive needs to be formatted" error.

First, stop trying to access the drive for a bit. Buy a new drive, install Windows. Plug your existing drive as a secondary, get recuva software, run it, see if it will find anything on your drive. Or maybe Windows will see your drive just fine as a secondary, although that is not likely. Just don't format it if it asks you to.