hard drive problem (again) - help - (maybe ghost problem)

aardvark · 8 May 2006 at 21:46

ok, quick recap - my hard drive (the windows drive) was behaving slow recently - we found that the drive was faulty and i sent it back to seagate - ok so far.

i could still access the data and used ghost to restore an image of the drive to a spare old drive - that worked as well (booted fine and winxp was fine).

now, today i got the replacement drive back off seagate and i wanted to put xp back on this new drive - i partitioned it like the old one (40/120gig) and tried to restore the ghost image to this new drive, but it won't boot - it just says
'a disc read error occurred
press ctrl+alt+del to restart'

i tried this several different times using a couple of images i had (one of which i know works as i used the same one just last week to get my pc up and running) in windows and using the boot disc.

i did a seagate tools scan and it gave me partition errors on the first partition (the one i restored the xp drive to)

i don't really know where to go from here - can i fix the partition error somehow? (i did change the partitions earlier as i was trying to restore in various different ways and that didn't help).
could the drive be broken? (it has come direct from seagate so is this likely?)

i would really appreciate some help - i thought i was done with HD problems and then they start again

cheers

aardvark · 9 May 2006 at 09:36

yeah its version 9.
i set the active for booting and also the other option you said (tried it on and off)

ok, what i'll do is delete all the partitions from the new drive and try a ghost restore from there and see if that works (i guess i can always adjust the partition sizes at a later date with another program(?))

thanks

aardvark · 9 May 2006 at 12:34

cheers
i think for now i would happy if i can only get it booting - as least to show the drive isn't faulty (and therefore fixable)

i'll try what i said above tonight and will no doubt report back, postive or negative

aardvark · 9 May 2006 at 20:48

ok, i tried doing what i said above - i deleted all the partitions and used ghost to restore a winxp drive to the disk (one that i used last week on the drive i'm using at the moment and worked fine) but the drive still refuses to boot - again i get the disc read error i mentioned above (this is with the other bootable drive unplugged). The files are on there - i can see them in xp (if i boot with my old drive) but the drive isn't booting.

i'm all out of ideas - it should work but it doesn't.

remember that this is a replacement drive from seagate - could it be faulty (it certainly sounds like it)

thanks for any help

aardvark · 10 May 2006 at 11:32

HD fitness test? - i've never heard of it - is that part of chkdsk?

aardvark · 10 May 2006 at 12:59

yeah - thats the one i already used and gave me partition errors.

i'm a bit doubious about seatools as it didn't pickup my last problem (the drive that this new one has replaced).

is there anything else that could scan for a faulty boot sector?

cheers (i have also sent seagate a technical support email today so maybe they will say something about it)

aardvark · 11 May 2006 at 19:17

ok, it looks like i got it working

seagate recommended i use discwizard and i used that to transfer my old booting drive to the new drive and now xp is working and the drive booted fine - its only just booted up so there may be problems in the future but it should be ok.
why norton ghost didn't work is a mystery and doesn't fill me with confidence about using it in the future.

i have another question though - its a 160gb drive and i have only set up a small 40gb partition for the xp drive. how should i partition the other section of the disc? in the past i always thought that a drive can only have one primary partition and then the rest is an extended partition, but xp gives me the option of creating another primary partition - is this right and what do you recommend?

thanks a lot