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Its my first visit to the site so hop you all give me a big welcome and hopefully you can help me and i can help you all. I'm having a big problem starting one of my pc's at moment i turn it on and it wont load up i just get the message boot failure:system halted. Does this mean my hard drive is on its way out or is it just something simple i can do to fix the problem. Cheers dudeuk

The quick answer is yes your drive is probably fried, and I'm off to lunch.

The back from lunch answer is you can test your drive using your Windows XP install disk. In your BIOS make sure your ROM drive is the first boot drive and insert your disk into the drive. Boot your computer. Follow the prompts as your computer boots into the disk. Choose to fix a windows install and you will eventually be provided with a DOS like prompt. Type in help and hit enter. You'll be presented with a list of the services that you can run from the disk. Look for check disk or chkdsk. I may not have the spelling exactly correct so look closely at the list and you'll be able to figure it out. type chkdsk and hit enter. Let the program run and if you get errors your hard drive is kaput.

Of course if you don't have XP then you can download the hard drive's disk utility from the manufacturer's website. You'll also have to have a working computer with a floppy drive or a CD burner to do that. I don't have any experience with Vista yet, so you could possibly do the same thing with the Vista disk.

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