Laptop wont boot, HD problem

RoboCod

RoboCod

RoboCod

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Joined
19 Jun 2004
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On the Amiga500
Hi, I have a dell Vostro 1700, it has a Hitachi 5400rpm 160gb Hard Drive.

Last night I got BSOD but upon reboot Vista wouldnt boot any further than the booting up screen (the horizontal scrolling bar). HD light kept blinking but I noticed the drive sounded like it couldn't read a portion correctly, i.e. kept making the same read sound like it was jammed.

Tried inserting windows disc but still wouldnt boot beyond scroll bar. Had HD out and it will boot with a windows disc without the HD in. Is it likely that the HD is completely borked? Can it be restored any how?

Cheers

CP
 
Sounds like it still attempted to boot from the hard drive when you had the Windows disc in there, you may need to press a F key to access a boot options menu (F12 usually be may be different) so that you can make sure it's booting from the windows disc.
 
The problem is I just can't boot the system with the HDD wired up. It tries to read and gets stuck, even when booting from windows CD. I have now tried booting from a USB hard drive copy of windows XP and I just get BSOD. I'm so frustrated it is untrue :(
 
Managed to start scanning. A quick scan turned up no errors ( :confused: ) so running a thorough scan now (takes about an hour). Laptop has 2 ports for a HDD so I have tried booting in the 2nd slot with the same result as in the first, pretty sure it's the HDD failing but now unsure why the test has passed.
 
Quick tests in DFT usually do pass in my experience, then the advanced one will fail, I've yet to see any drive fail the quick test.
 
I'm in! Errors found and managed to carry out a sector repair. Booted into safe mode, 1st thing 1st I'm copying everything to portable HDD that I hadn't already :)

Thanks for your help, I really wouldn't have sussed it myself. I wonder why this happened, or just one of those things?

Cheers!

CP
 
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