won't boot up

[earache]

recently bought a second hand P.C. worked fine for a couple of weeks but now wont boot up. A short while after start button pressed, ''Error reading c drive Abort,Retry,Fail''. wont start in safe mode same fault. P.C. details AMD500 6gig 64 ram on board sound and video, running win 98se,
can you help? thanx.

[markjj]

I came across exactly the same problem on my brothers laptop recently. It was simply a case of the hd coming to the end of its life. A replacement sorted the problem out ok. Off the top of my head, other areas to look at are:-

-bios. Have you been into it recently and altered the 'drives' settings?
-IDE cables. Have you had the pc opened up and loosened the cable to/from the hd?
-Possible virus. Any .exe files downloaded recently?
-Any tinkering with Windows settings in the registry or msconfig files?

If it comes down to a new hd you should be able to pick one up quite cheap at one of the many fairs around West. Yorks. over the weekend. From my experience try and avoid recon. drives or those with a month or so guarantee.

Any other 'symptoms' shown on the screen at all?

Mark.

[Paleo Pete]

I'm afraid the drive is gone, but you can try a couple of things to prove it.
1. Boot to a start up disk, and run fdisk, see if it sees a drive. If it gives you a "No Hard Disks Found" message, assume the worst...

2. If it sees the hard drive, check the pertition information, and repartition it if necessary, after the next step.

3. Type fdisk_/mbr at the A:\> prompt, using a space in place of the inderscore ( _ ) used here, then type sys_c: which will rewrite the master boot record, then copy the system files to the drive.

If you finally get it to read the drive, run scandisk from the start up disk. scandisk_c:_/autofix_/nosummary_/surface will run an unattended scandisk on the drive, fix any errors automatically, run a surface scan, and not give you the pop up window asking if you want to fix errors.

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[earache]

Thankyou for your help both of you. I managed to sort it out with the help of a friend, by formating the hard drive, it automaticaly did a scan disk, that found some errors and once autofix was selected it continued to scan the 'c'drive. After reinstalling windows I did a defrag and some more errors were found and fortunately it is working ok (fingers crossed it stays that way). Thankyou once again.

[Paleo Pete]

Run scandisk and defrag fairly often for a month or so, of it keeps finding more errors every time, get ready to replace it.

------------------
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)