Win XP stopped booting

Hi Everybody,
This problem has me totally confused perhaps somebody could outline what exactly has happened here.

First off its a fairly old Windows XP Pro desktop pc that i use for older apps etc. i only use it occasionally,it's got a gig of ram and runs pretty good. The other day during a session the machine was running really slow,not inclined to complete any task. So i rebooted and got an error telling me the hal.dll was corrupt or missing. I tried to run bootcfg /rebuild from the Windows Recovery console but i just got more error messages.

I tried to run restore from the command prompt and that didn't work. Then i began to get ntldr missing or corrupt error messages.
From this point i couldn't really access anything on the hard drive. The recovery console would open,but it did not give the option of logging on to the c: drive.

I tried a repair instal and that failed too.

I booted from a UBCD and discovered that the C: drive was now only 10MB in size and its second partition was showing itself as a drive but without any details. The C: was now a FAT partition and i'm pretty sure it was NTFS originally. The disc is actually 60GB and is partitioned c: @37GB and e: @20ish Gb

I also discovered at this stage that there was a floppy disc in the floppy drive,and WinXP had rebooted with that disc in the floppy drive and always in the past i would get the 'non system disc' error if that happened, on this occasion the machine did not throw up that error message, would this be significant??

So i took out the hdd and on another machine i changed it's file system to NTFS, on both partitions and then i made one partition out of them, i ran chkdsk in UBCD and it has repaired some errors, i have listed some of the repairs it carried out:

Repaired unreadable security descriptors data stream
Corrected errors in the uppercase file adding 24812 bad clusters to the Bad Clusters file
Corrected errors in the Master File Tables (MFT) bitmap attribute
Corrected errors in the volume Bitmap
Windows has made corrections to the file system

Looks like this drive was chewed up

If Windows XP re-installs ok, can i still trust this drive? or should i just chuck it in the bin………..or is it not as bad as it looks:-)

I would really appreciate any help in understanding what has happened here.

Thank you

Hi sammy5575
Sorry to hear about the problems with your computer, and the errors you have encountered with your hard drive…….but a warm welcome to the WTT forums.
The symptoms you describe are all fairly typical of a hard drive that is beginning to fail…..
No hard drive will last for ever…….. sooner or later they are all likely to fail.

You could try running chkdsk again with the r switch
chkdsk /r
and could also try downloading the hard drive manufacturers repair and disc checking utility
have a look here:
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
Start with running the short test and if this is Ok then perform the longer test….. (there's no real need to perform the acoustic test)
If it checks out OK then maybe you can still continue to use it….. but if it came into my workshop then I would just fit a new hard drive
(they are very inexpensive) and reinstall Windows all required Applicationsr and other stuff….

If you have a good disc image taken recently when things were running well this will have you up and running in 40 minutes or so…. if you don't have a good image handy (from something like Ghost, Acronis, Paragon, Macrium etc) then it will take a bit longer.
Post back if you have any questions.
Regards
paws

Hi paws, Thank you for the quick reply. Well i ran chkdsk from the command prompt again and it fixed a bunch of errors. But when i tried re-installing windows it just gets stuck in the same place every time. So looks like the disc is boogied, but whats scary is the fact that it took all the data PLUS the other partition as well!! So much for keeping data off the C: drive for safety :-) This disc was working perfectly and i am convinced that the fact it booted with the floppy in its drive caused some sort of domino effect,what d'ya think? I didn't lose anything important but consider it a learning curve. Thanks again for your help.

Hi sammy5575, Once a hard drive starts to fail then all data and in fact anything on any part of the drive is at risk. One of the main reasons for putting data on a separate partition of the drive is to make it easy to format and reinstall Windows on your C drive leaving the data drive intact…… it doesn't really add much to data security……. A disc image however can have you up and running in next to no time…. As you say, if you leave a floppy disc in your machine when booting it up its can return the "Non System Disc error) however it would be a rare set of circumstances that could lead to some sort of domino effect…. Regards paws

Hi paws, Thank you for your input, and wise words. I have learned a lesson here,no doubt. I guess you can lock this one Thank you.