Skoberlink
Posts: 7 +0
Ok sorry in advance for such a long post. Instead of adding details as people ask for them I'm gonna try to tell the whole story now.
I homebuilt my first computer (in fact posted about it here when I had a problem with powering up) and other than a power button problem had no real incidents.
I installed Windows vista home premium on a 400 GB seagate (used) and spent a few hours downloading thunderbird and firefox and tweaking the settings. I also installed drivers, one game and copied all my music over.
I then installed UBuntu 8.04 on my other HDD a 120 GB seagate (also used) and set it all up in my free time over a couple days.
This is a dual boot system so after installing Ubuntu I loaded windows to check that it worked and then spent the rest of my time since install in Ubuntu.
I mounted the windows drive in linux so I could access the music and did general setup tweaking settings etc. for ubuntu. (i have successfully loaded windows since the first time I mounted it's drive so I don't think that's the problem but i figured it might be relevant)
I then couldn't get a mic to work in linux so I tried to reboot into windows. It went incredibly slow and then finally loaded the login in screen and I immediately got an alert saying (filepath)/Prefetch is corrupted run chkdsk. So i logged in and was bombarded by tons of these alerts some of them doubled up and some not. Anyway I finally got chkdsk working and it immediately started listing off numbered segments as unreadable (first time using chkdsk so I didn't really no what this meant but I got the gist) and then locked up around 230 something. So I did a hard reboot and then it wouldn't load at all. It was hanging on the "Starting up ..." screen after selecting a boot in the GRUB bootloader. So I put in my Vista install disk and went into command prompt to run chkdsk.
First it said that the disk was writeprotected and that drove me nuts for a while until i figured out it was trying to check the install disc. So I finally got that figured out but when I told it to check C: it said that the MFT is unreadable and tried to recover it (I assume by checking MFT mirror) but couldn't do it so chkdsk was aborted.
Also Ubuntu wil no longer mount this saying that the disk is corrupt (essentially I'm paraphrasing here) and that i should run chkdsk /f (which obviously doesn't work)
So I have several questions:
1. What could have corrupted this in the first place?
2. Is there a way for me to recover the files and program settings without spending money (or at least not much)?
3. If I wipe the harddrive and reinstall will it work? Or is the hard drive physically corrupted (don't hear any odd sounds or anything)?
Also I would lover any other suggestions for a fix without reinstalling or buying a new hdd so whatever you can tell me s much appreciated. Again sorry for the huge post
I homebuilt my first computer (in fact posted about it here when I had a problem with powering up) and other than a power button problem had no real incidents.
I installed Windows vista home premium on a 400 GB seagate (used) and spent a few hours downloading thunderbird and firefox and tweaking the settings. I also installed drivers, one game and copied all my music over.
I then installed UBuntu 8.04 on my other HDD a 120 GB seagate (also used) and set it all up in my free time over a couple days.
This is a dual boot system so after installing Ubuntu I loaded windows to check that it worked and then spent the rest of my time since install in Ubuntu.
I mounted the windows drive in linux so I could access the music and did general setup tweaking settings etc. for ubuntu. (i have successfully loaded windows since the first time I mounted it's drive so I don't think that's the problem but i figured it might be relevant)
I then couldn't get a mic to work in linux so I tried to reboot into windows. It went incredibly slow and then finally loaded the login in screen and I immediately got an alert saying (filepath)/Prefetch is corrupted run chkdsk. So i logged in and was bombarded by tons of these alerts some of them doubled up and some not. Anyway I finally got chkdsk working and it immediately started listing off numbered segments as unreadable (first time using chkdsk so I didn't really no what this meant but I got the gist) and then locked up around 230 something. So I did a hard reboot and then it wouldn't load at all. It was hanging on the "Starting up ..." screen after selecting a boot in the GRUB bootloader. So I put in my Vista install disk and went into command prompt to run chkdsk.
First it said that the disk was writeprotected and that drove me nuts for a while until i figured out it was trying to check the install disc. So I finally got that figured out but when I told it to check C: it said that the MFT is unreadable and tried to recover it (I assume by checking MFT mirror) but couldn't do it so chkdsk was aborted.
Also Ubuntu wil no longer mount this saying that the disk is corrupt (essentially I'm paraphrasing here) and that i should run chkdsk /f (which obviously doesn't work)
So I have several questions:
1. What could have corrupted this in the first place?
2. Is there a way for me to recover the files and program settings without spending money (or at least not much)?
3. If I wipe the harddrive and reinstall will it work? Or is the hard drive physically corrupted (don't hear any odd sounds or anything)?
Also I would lover any other suggestions for a fix without reinstalling or buying a new hdd so whatever you can tell me s much appreciated. Again sorry for the huge post
