Hi I was working happily on my PC today when it suddenly stopped working and rebooted. It would not reboot though, it got onto the 2nd page of booting and then gave the error messege "A disk read error occured" I have got into command prompt and typed DIR at the c prompt and all it shows is RECOVER. Can someone please tell me how to start up in safe mode or alternative. I am running XP home on a P4. I think that my hard drive may be knackered but do not know. It is 80gb divided up into 3 - c drive, back up (E) and Recover (F) Any help greatly appreciated
I looked at that thread but I am unable to boot in safe mode by using F8. I also cannot boot from the CD rom. I just get a blank screen Thanks for trying though
You said earlier that you could get to a command prompt .How did you do that ? Can you still get there? Exactly how far does the boot process go. I see that you have one drive called Backup.Does that involve any type of Image drive software,eg. Ghost ?
I can get to the prompt through a restore CD. It asks if I want to restore or go to DOS. Backup is just the name of a drive. I am not that tech literate though so may be wrong. I have performed scandisk and it showed up fine. I can access CMOS and it can detect the hard drive. How can I start in ghost mode? Cheers for all your help
Ghost ,Drive Image are retail software examples of a program that can back up you whole computer . Then if you have a problem like your having now ,these programs can usually boot your computer, without Windows and reload your complete system exactly as it was as of the last backup.Since you don,t have this in place it won't help now ,but you may want to look into this after we get your present problem fixed. Do you have something like Norton anti virus loaded onto your machine?Because their cd's can also boot and attempt a repair without windows. Failing that you may have to reload windows.
I have tried to boot from Norton but all it did was virus check the PC (no problems) I guess my HD is pretty much no good now then? I will certainly get a ghost programme in the future! If you have any further ideas then please let me know Cheers David
I am not sure your drive is gone ,but unless you are going either buy diagnostic software ,which I am not sure you will know how to use, or take your Machine to a Shop,Let them try and capture your data then fix the problem and reload. I think your going to have to re-install your Windows and all of your programs etc.If you have no back up of your data that is the real shame. The windows CD can format ,Partion and run Chkdisk ,before you reload Windows.This you can do on your own ,but you will have to determine what course of action you are comfortable with.
