Disk Read Error

[Ashur]

Yay me and my home PC. Any immediate troubleshooting thoughts? Won't boot. Connect/disconnect HDD?

[Canelek]

This is what I would do first, just to isolate your disk, as far as what is busted:

Yeah, go ahead and re-seat power and SATA/IDE connections to your drive
Boot into BIOS and reset defaults
Reboot and go back to BIOS
See if your drive is listed, and configure settings as necessary
Reboot
See if the drive shows up in your post

No?

Power Down
Change SATA/IDE port on your motherboard
Reboot into BIOS
Check Drive/SATA port

Reboot and see if you have the drive listed in post now

That isn't a whole lot, but here you can tell if you have a bad SATA/IDE port and/or a bad drive

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

I would look for a Hirens bootable disc and run some of their hard drive repair utilities. Another option is as simple as piggybacking that drive to a PC that is functioning to see if that machine can see and read the drive. If it can, you can run chkdsk /r /f to repair bad sectors and file structure. If it cannot even see the drive, then you probably have controller issues which means costly recovery of data.


Hirens has saved a couple of drives for me.....but chkdsk has literally saved hundreds.

[Soreali]

I would look for a Hirens bootable disc and run some of their hard drive repair utilities. Another option is as simple as piggybacking that drive to a PC that is functioning to see if that machine can see and read the drive. If it can, you can run chkdsk /r /f to repair bad sectors and file structure. If it cannot even see the drive, then you probably have controller issues which means costly recovery of data.


Hirens has saved a couple of drives for me.....but chkdsk has literally saved hundreds.

Yeah that pretty much summed it up.. ERD Commander is good if you can still find one of those hiding out somewhere.

[Ashur]

Thanks guys!

Kilmoll, I found the Hiren's page and I can stick it on my USB bootable stick, but I can't find the actual download link (even in the download section). Am I missing something?

Edit: N/M! Found it!

[Aabidano]

Hirens has saved a couple of drives for me.....but chkdsk has literally saved hundreds.

What he said.

Stopped a $100k \ hour system outage with fsck once

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

Thanks guys!

Kilmoll, I found the Hiren's page and I can stick it on my USB bootable stick, but I can't find the actual download link (even in the download section). Am I missing something?

Edit: N/M! Found it!

You would be assuming that I went to Hiren's webpage sir

For the record, I have several versions of Hirens and a few different versions of ERD and the Ultimate Bootdisks. If you might have space on an external server, I would be interested in storing backups of my .iso's there.


wink wink nudge nudge

[Leonaerd]

this thread += good

[Ashur]

Sees the disk from Hirens, chkdsk /r/f fixed a bunch of issues. Still won't boot to it.

[Animalor]

Have you tried Spinrite on the disk? Apparently it's fantastic at fixing logical errors on a drive or finding bad sectors in critical areas of the disk.

[Ashur]

My efforts to restore boot-ability to the disk have all failed, but I can read the data from a boot CD. I have a second hard drive arriving today (as a miracle gift from a friend!). If I mount the new disk as primary, would I be able to install the Windows 7 as a (64 bit) upgrade (I have upgrade DVDs, not the full version) onto the new HDD?

If so then I should just be able to copy all my old documents and just reinstall my apps under 64-bit Win 7.

[Soreali]

If I were you Ash, since you're able to access/read documents when booted off Hirens, if I remember correctly, it has USB storage support. You should take whatever important files/documents off the bad drive and back them up to the stick before attempt to to run any upgrades, just in case the HD is actually shot and gets any worse..

If thats not a big deal, then go for it!

[Ashur]

I'll give that a shot. I meant to try that last week, but had way too much going on.