Anilrgowda

Question
For some reason the other day my computer stopped working, not sure why but now when the computer loads it states that the Boot.ini file cannot be found and tries to recover using C:\Windows.

On doing this, I get a lovely monochrome progress bar and then the computer states it needs to use CHKDIK (not sure if thats right, its the scanning hard drive facility I think) and then when looking through the entries most seem to be unreadable.

Unfortunately it gets no further than this as often it gets an unspecified error and restarts the computer starting the process again.

From this question I seem to be asking a few things.

1) Is there a way to get any data off the hard drive without getting Windows to run? Or any way possible, I'm open to ideas.
2) Is this a big problem? Can it be fixed with a format and reinstall. I'm pretty resigned to the fact I will need to reformat eventually .
3) My hard drive seems to be making screeching noises, so I presumed that might have gone, Is that a possiblity.

Any help with any of these questions would be greatly appreciated.
neutrinohunter

Solution

Definitely sounds like your hard drive has gone bad. Do you have a floppy drive on the computer? I would suggest running a disk diagnostic utility. Most disk vendors have these for free.

www.seagate.com
www.maxtor.com
www.westerndigital.com
www.quantum.com
www.ibm.com
www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm
www.fujitsu.com
www.wdc.com/service/ftp/drives.html

fujitsu
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download...es/#diagnostic

IBM and Hitachi
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

Maxtor/Quantum
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/products/index.htm

Samsung
http://www.samsungelectronics.com/hd...ies_index.html

Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html

Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/