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No. I have installed nothing recently.
Perhaps you don't remember. Or you let Windows Update install a
driver rather than going to the hardware manufacturer's web site to
get THEIR driver rather than what Microsoft proffers for that
manufacturer through Windows Update (which is not wholly accurate in
detecting the hardware to determine if the driver is appropriate).
The disc is not dead yet. Sometimes I can restart windows in safe
mode, but
not always. I usually keeps rebooting when windows starts.
Could be a driver that is not for that version of Windows, or a flaky
driver (i.e., poor code), or the driver is not for your specific
hardware.
Do you have Windows configured to automatically login with no prompt
for your login credentials (username and password)? If so, perhaps
your user profile is corrupted. Windows tries to login under your
profile, it is corrupt, and Windows aborts.
Do you get a blue screen on the forced reboot? If so, what does it
say?
First thing I thought it would be a windows problem. Then I tried to
reinstall windows over the old installation, so I would not lose
anything. I
didn´t work because windows installer told that the drive was
damage and
needed to be formatted.
Then the file system has been corrupted. This could be due to the
drive going bad in that some sectors are no longer readable. The file
system is just more bytes on the sectors so it could be the file table
itself has been corrupted. Do you have a bootable DOS floppy with
'chkdsk' on it? If so, try running 'chkdsk /r' to check the file
system and also scan the sectors for readability. However, Windows
will try up to 5 times to reread a sector that fails (i.e., it fails
after the 5th attempt) and drives may mask up to 3 bad reads, so the
failure might not occur until after the 15th actual read attempt,
maybe more. The /r option to chkdsk is very basic and does nothing
much more than verify a sector is readable. SpinRite (not free)
performs a more in-depth analysis of the hard disk and can recover
what chkdsk would never be able to recover.
If you don't have a bootable DOS floppy with 'chkdsk', go to
www.bootdisk.com to get an .exe that will lay down an image onto a
floppy in the A: drive.
