cannot read disk....

[kymberlee76]

My computer is about one year old and is a 400mhz emachines with an 8.4 gig hard drive. Windows 98 was already installed when I bought the machine. Anyway, for about the last four months, I have been periodically having the computer completely freeze on me, requiring me to just shut it down. I will sometimes receive a blue screen saying that there is an error reading the disk in drive c. Also, I cannot completely defragment my disk or perform a thorough scandisk because there are errors somewhere on my disk...the errors are somewhere in my data area. There are days that I can run the computer for hours without problems, and others where the freeze up occurs almost immediately. What kind of errors do you think I have and how should I fix them? Thanks, kym

[Jerkymom]

I will sometimes receive a blue screen saying that there is an error reading the disk in drive c. Also, I cannot completely defragment my disk or perform a thorough scandisk because there are errors somewhere on my disk...the errors are somewhere in my data area.


Try running scandisk from the DOS prompt (not the MS-DOS command prompt within Win98). Tap the F8 key while your computer is booting (before you see the "Starting Windows98" message) until you reach the boot menu. Choose "command prompt only", which will boot you to the C:\> prompt in DOS. Type scandisk_/autofix_/nosummary_/surface [Enter] I've used the underscores ( _ ) only to show clearly where one space needs to be left between commands - they don't get typed in. Hopefully this will either repair the corrupted data areas on the hard drive or mark the damaged sectors as bad to prevent data from being written to them.

If scandisk cannot correct the errors, I believe your drive has physical damage and will need to be replaced.

Kim

[hardie21]

I would try to backup all of information from your hard drive and re-installing the OS from your Recovery CD you should have recevied when you purchased your machine!!! Hope it helps.

[Paleo Pete]

Hardie21: Please don't recommend reinstalling the OS unless it is absolutetly a last resort. Most of the problems we see here can be fixed without going to that extreme. In this case, scandisk will most likely find and fix the disk errors, and we can gradually narrow down the problem with lockups. Reinstalling is not necessary.

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[Matt]

Be very, very careful if you are acually going to reinstall the OS. I have found that some computers with pre-installed OS software are EXTREMELY picky when it comes to copying the back-up OS onto your HD. I have already seen someone turn two HP computers into door stops by reformatting his hard drive, of course after doing so the back-up disk did not reconize the computer as an HP computer and refused to work. Re-installing the OS should be an absolute last resort! Try using Nortan disk doctor or Windoctor.

[PostCode]

If there are errors on the drive, according to scandisk that is, it'll try to mark them bad regardless and attempt to move the data to another location on the drive. (every drive manufacturered actually has a number of sectors/cylanders allocated for this purpose). If scandisk refused to work, then you COULD and I say this with extreme caution, low level format your drive. As long as you use the drive manufacturers software to perform this, it's a safe operation. Low level formating is not recommended in modern IDE drives, but in cases when scandisk wants to mark x number of sectors bad, it's one of the only ways to rectify the problem. I have had several drives that I have worked on and had to do this to. If the drive is making clunking or high pitched whines, it may very well just be going bad, but it may be just a case of scandisk messying up also. Check with your drive manufacturer's site and read up on their utilities to repair drives. Hope this helps somewhat.

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