Hi all, I throw myself at the mercy of your collective knowledge for some help.

My Laptop decided to crash suddenly, now on attempting to restart I get the Windows did not restart properly screen, and no matter which of the options I choose, after a short time the blue screen apears for a split second and the machine tries to restart again.

I accessed the "setup" option prior to start up and ran the Hard drive self test, which FAILED (hash)1 - 07.

Usefully I have the details of an e-ticket I rather urgently need in my outlook.
I cannot find my recovery CD (XP pro).

What can I do? Any advice????
Thanks

The hard drive self-test failed.. Could it be that your hard drive is bad? :O Duh!

Download the diagnostic utility from the HD maker and see what exactly is wrong.

How can you run it if you cant even get to windows?? Downloading it means going into windows...WHICH HE CANT...unless he uses a different computer and burns a CD or makes a floppy, but still, how can it run?

Many drive checking utilities are bootable for this very reason.

if you can not get the drive to be seen in xp
on boot got to bios see if it is seen by the bios
is so may still be ok just a OS glitch
as Nodsu suggested get the bootable floppy or cd and run it

PM me if you need closer inspection of drive

He made this thread here, so obviously he has access to another computer. And yes, the HD diagnostic utilities are available as DOS utilities that can be run from a floppy or a CD. It would be rather silly, if a hard drive was required to work in order to diagnose it, wouldn't it?

....okay, I am having the same issue with my laptop. Has there been any resolution to this, or did the thread just die? Interested before I go off on a wild tangent of waht-might-work....much like working on the lights on my wife's truck. Long story.

thanks.

I'll be in a dark room crying now.

Rule #1 of computing. ALWAYS back up. No excuse. A second hard drive is a wise investment. Sorry to hear you lost your crap.

Tedster--
Three NCOERs, two ETS Awards, and the next FY Class schedules, tracked by an hourly basis.
The ONE day I don't back my stuff up at 3 am, expecting to to PT at 0530 and be in the office NLT 0700.....yeah.
Hopefully, I can recover what I am really after. PureEdge is convenient like that.

SO. With that rant outta the way, anyone have any recommendations for a drive diagnostic tool I can pull down so I can get to work on this thing?

I am trying something called Ultimate Boot CD 4, on the recommendation of an individual who knows more than just where the power button on the computer is. I will keep interested parties posted (no pun intended) as to how it works out.

May God Have Mercy on my Soul

Toujours Pret...just not this time.

You are supposed to use the tool specific to your hard drive brand.

Yes, UBCD contains all the tools from all the HD makers, so it's a good thing to use.

Okay, yall are gonna LOVE this one.
Run BIOS diagnostic, get error listed above.
Use UBDS for a little more flexibility, several diags come back as "Are You Stupid? There is nothing wrong with this disk, you *****. Please return when you are qualified to turn a computer on." Well, I may be exaggerating, but yall get the gist.
Again, try to boot computer.
Again, same error.
A buddy of mine tosses me hard drive, tells me I can have it.
This hard drive, which I know for a fact has an OS on it, doesn't even get me to the BIOS. However, UBCD still comes up, since it is still in the drive.
Figuring, hey this PC is probably fried three ways from Sunday, I pull his hard drive out (I can here people crying at this point), put my drive back in, and now my computer is golden. Well, tarnished gold. A nice shiny amber color, you could say.
Point is:
I don't know what happened, but it unhappened.
And I am doing a complete back up of my laptop, and will be swapping hard drives (keeping my original, maybe turning it into an external drive); and wiping his (since it has 60G vs my 40) and putting all my crap onto it.
Especially since chkdisk shows mine has 12 bad sectors.
So, how do I repair a bad sector?