Disk read error

[Guest]

Last week, after doing a restart of my computer, I noticed that it started up
slowly and yahoo messenger that starts up automatically did not come up. I
found that suspicious so I restarted my computer. That's when I got 'Disk
Read Error. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart'. I rebooted with my WINXP CD and
went to the recovery console. I did a 'chkdsk /R'. It went 25% of the way and
then stopped with some 'unrecoverable error' message. I restarted my computer
again and got the 'NTLDR is missing' error (probably chkdsk /R fixed
something to get rid of the 'Disk Read Error'). Note that if I do just a
chkdsk (without parameters), I get a message that the disk is fine and there
are no errors.

Now, one interesting thing is that when I go to the recovery console after
booting up with my WINXP CD, I never get a prompt for a password. When I
press 'R' to go to the recovery console after booting up with my CD, it takes
me straight to the "C:>" drive prompt without prompting for any administrator
password.

Another interesting thing is when I do a 'dir' at the C: prompt, I see only
a few directories (mostly my data directories). However, I don't see the
windows directory or the 'Documents and Settings' directory or 'Program
Files' directory.

Anyway, I tried some possible solutions and here is what happens:

(1) When I try 'bootcfg /rebuild', I get a message saying 'Scanning all
disks for Windows installations'. Then, I get an error message Error: Failed
to successfully scan disks for Windows installations. This may be due to
corrupt file system, etc. Use chkdsk to check for errors
(2) If I do fixboot, it prompts me if I want to write a new boot sector. I
answered 'Y' and the bootfix completed successfully
(3) If I do fixmbr, that too completes successfully.

However, I still end up with the same NTLDR problem (which I guess is
natural since I have so many directories apparently missing). I have also
tried copying boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr to the root directory. Then, I
get a missing hal.dll error when I try to start up.

Do these symptoms indicate a hard drive failure? I have already done a data
recovery on this drive. Would I be better off getting a new drive rather than
waste any more time trying to fix the existing one?

 

[Guest]

In recovery,the parameters are:CHKDSK C: /R Running CHKDSK /R It might
be chking the cdrom or cdrw,be specific or you'll get that 25% or less then
stops.You can also type:CHKDSK C: /p Which is less technical than /R Try
runnung the /R then see how it operates.A 2nd hard drive is worth the
investment,
1.thier fairly inexpensive now 50.00 2.the old can be used for storage and
set
as a page file for C:

 

[PCDaddy]

Do you run anti virus software? Even if you do it's possible you had a virus. I just fixed my aunts pc and she had almost exact symtoms. hal is the hardware abstraction layer, if it's gone, it was probably a virus and you will have to do a clean install.