XP HE and a bad hard drive

[George]

Hi,

Seems like my (laptop) Thinkpad's hard drive has a bad
spot or two and won't boot (XP Home Edition installed.)

I was thinking I'd grab Scandisk or Chkdsk from my
desktop's XP Professional Edition system and put them on
a bootable floppy so I could block out the bad spots, but
XP Professional Edition doesn't seem to have Scandisk (is
that possible?) I tried this with Chkdsk, but it won't
run without Windows.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
George

 

[davetest]

Hi,

Seems like my (laptop) Thinkpad's hard drive has a bad
spot or two and won't boot (XP Home Edition installed.)

I was thinking I'd grab Scandisk or Chkdsk from my
desktop's XP Professional Edition system and put them on
a bootable floppy so I could block out the bad spots, but
XP Professional Edition doesn't seem to have Scandisk (is
that possible?) I tried this with Chkdsk, but it won't
run without Windows.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
George

When you boot XP do you get a choice of recovery
console from the menu? If so boot it and run chkdsk.
Otherwise, Boot directly from the XP CD and run chkdsk
from the recovery console there.
Dave

 

[Richard Urban]

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Richard Urban]

No version of NT (includes Windows XP) ever had scandisk. Also, chkdsk will
not run from a bootup floppy! Boot from the Windows XP CD to the repair
console. Run chkdsk from there.

I know, you don't have the CD - right? You're out of luck then!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[George]

Unfortunately, nothing comes up other than an operating
system failure message after a number of retries. Nor
will it boot from the XP CD or the IBM Recovery CD.

I need to do something from a floppy.

Thanks, Dave.

 

[George]

Unfortunately, nothing comes up other than an operating
system failure message after a number of retries. Nor
will it boot from the XP CD or the IBM Recovery CD.

I need to do something from a floppy.

Thanks Richard.

 

[Guest]

Since my system won't boot from the hard
drive or from a CD (neither from the Thinkpad Recovery CD
nor from the Windows XP CD), I think I need to move to
the next level and consider using a floppy to run FDISK
and then reformat my hard drive. (The system IS backed
up ... yay.)

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Since my system won't boot from the hard
drive or from a CD (neither from the Thinkpad Recovery CD
nor from the Windows XP CD), I think I need to move to
the next level and consider using a floppy to run FDISK
and then reformat my hard drive. (The system IS backed
up ... yay.)

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

Thanks.

 

[Plato]

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

Cant hurt to try.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Seems like my (laptop) Thinkpad's hard drive has a bad
spot or two and won't boot (XP Home Edition installed.)

I was thinking I'd grab Scandisk or Chkdsk from my
desktop's XP Professional Edition system and put them on
a bootable floppy so I could block out the bad spots, but
XP Professional Edition doesn't seem to have Scandisk (is
that possible?) I tried this with Chkdsk, but it won't
run without Windows.

Scandisk does not come with XP at all (being purely a FAT 32 program).
If you can boot a CD, boot a regular XP CD (rather then the OEM Restore
one you probably have) and, instead of Setup, take the immediate R for
Repair. Assume any password requested is blank, and TAB over.

You can run CHKDSK /F C: from that

 

[Alex Nichol]

Since my system won't boot from the hard
drive or from a CD (neither from the Thinkpad Recovery CD
nor from the Windows XP CD), I think I need to move to
the next level and consider using a floppy to run FDISK
and then reformat my hard drive. (The system IS backed
up ... yay.)

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

You can use that - but then have a FAT32 HD, which you may not want.
Also if XP is currently on NTFS, you will have to run the FDISK to
'delete Non-DOS partition' as first stage

Alternative is to download the appropriate version from
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;310994
of a program that generates a set of six floppies; booting those gets
you to the same point as if you booted the XP CD, so you can run the
Setup from it. And in that when it asks where to put the system, hit
ESC and you can delete the present partition and make a new one.