One of my computers was booting down as a powercut hit my house. Afterwards, when I tried to boot said computer up to see if it was allright, I got the following BSoD Error message, after the XP loading screen. This seems to imply to a Hard-Drive corruption/error, though I many be mistaken

Hard Error c0000218
Unknown Hard Error

(same other junk here which goes to quickly to read)

What should I do? Reformat and reinstall windows?

The meaning of your stop code is as follows.

0xC0000218: UNKNOWN_HARD_ERROR

A necessary Registry hive file couldn’t be loaded. The file may be corrupt or missing (requiring either an Emergency Repair Disk or a Windows reinstallation). The Registry files may have been corrupted because of hard disk corruption or some other hardware problem. A driver may have corrupted the Registry data while loading into memory, or the memory where the Registry is loading may have a parity error (turn off the external cache and check the physical RAM).

As you can see from the above, this is either caused by registry corruption, or a hardware problem.

If you go HERE you can click on your error code. It`s the sixth from bottom in the righthand pane.

There are articles on how to troubleshoot this particular stop code.

Regards Howard

Some further assisstnce would be very helpful, the articles looked useful but I don't know how to half the things in them, further more it wouldn't let me reformat.

Edit: OK I've found the Recovery Consol, I had two boot discs for this PC, I got the second one has a similar thing happened but I lost the harddrive drivers, the second disc had the harddrive drivers but not the recovery consol and vice versa. When I use the disk with the consol it complains I don't have a harddrive, I've checked the connections and the are fine. The disc with the drivers, I tried to reformat, it complained at me it could not access the harddrive. Has my harddrive gone???

All I can say is, it`s a possibility.

The fact that it won`t let you format is pretty suspicious. Try a different ide cable, just in case.

Regards Howard

Its a Maxtor SATA DiamondMax Plus 9, and unfortunatly I don't have a spare SATA Lead, though I have made sure it wasn't the power supply... I'll get the Techsperts at Work to look at it tomorrow. Anyone know any english sites where I can buy a similar product just in case, I have been looking but I know very little about buying hard drives. My Motherboard is a Asus K8 (any other info needed?)