hard drive crash? - help!

[nicK]

I brought my pc back from college today to find when i booted up at home, it wouldn't work.
It got past the boot screen, then onto the "Windows XP Pro loading thing" but would then goes blank and the monitor's light flashes. (windows doesn't actually load)
I thought it was the ram so i changed it about, still the same problem. Then i tried a different hard drive, which loaded win98 perfectly. So the problem lies with the hard drive. It's a Samung Spinpoint 160gb (2partitions). I stuck it into my other computer as slave and it showed up as 1drive. When i tried to access the data on it, it just says "The disk drive in E: is not formatted. Would you like to format now?" - i don't want to have to format my 160gbs .. is there any way of saving it?

gwladys boy

hey there

when u have the drive connected to another pc as a slave

is the o/s on the working pc win xp or win 98, as they are not compatible

if you got win xp on your 'bust' drive its almost deffo be able to read from another pc with win xp installed and connected as a slave

its strage that it wont boot up. you need to supply more info to me.

eric

have you dual operating systems installed on the bust drive?

[nicK]

both systems are running win xp pro, so there shouldn't be any compatibility issues..
and no, i don't have dual operating systems installed..

can anyone else help with this? - is it corrupted?

unkel

Whowh, hold on

Your systems might both be xp, but the file system might be different (FAT, FAT32, NTFS)

The fact that your drive starts booting into xp, kinda shows it's unlikely it's a hardware problem. It is much more likely it's a software problem

Start in safe mode and install all the latest drivers for your hardware

Should that not work, reboot your pc with the xp cd in the drive, go into installation mode and run recovery

Still no luck, do a clean xp install

Hope that helps

[nicK]

nah, both file systems are NTFS..
ive started in safe mode and it won't load either

Cal

You have spagged your OS. Boot from the XP disk and reinstall over your old XP. Don't format or partition. Repair will probably fail so you will have to carry on as if doing a fresh install but install to default location even though you will be warned there is an OS there already. It may not be the prettiest recovery but will work.

Cal

[nicK]

thx lads.. ill give that a shot just as soon as i find my feckin' winxp cd

leeroybrown

It might also be worth your while running a test on it with Samsung's HDD diagnostic tool:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/shdiag.htm

Most manufacturers tools are quite good when it comes to diagnosing (and repairing) possible faults.
(be careful not to select a destructive test by accident)

[nicK]

it's now working all of a sudden!

i found my winxp cd earlier and was just about to reinstall it when i said i'd give it another go at booting up and sure enough, windows completely loaded. It said "Windows has recovered from a serious error, would you like to send to microsoft.net, yes/no?" or something..

anyway tis working now, thx for the suggestions.. i might run that hard drive diagnostic tool on it anyway to see if it's completely ok.

[nicK]

i'm after rebooting and the same thing happened again.. it's not booting to windows!
i ran partition magic 7 in dos mode and scanned for errors. It gives an error and says that the the hard disk is "improperly dismounted". What does this mean? Anybody else get this problem before?

Mac daddy

Have a look here for that message what Pmagic is giving you