Hard Drive Dead????

Ive had a quick peek through the message boards and cant find a solution. My hard drive has been playin up for a while, now when i boot up it asks me to insert my O/S disk....does this mean my H/D is dead? once i place my O/S disk in cd drive and boot from that i can access anything on my hard drive, any idea? do i need to get a new hard drive? if so, would i be able to copy my old H/D to my new H/D?

Hoping you can help guys

 

Best way to tell is to download the motherboard maker's diagnostic program from their website, and run that. It will tell you definitely if the hard drive is defective/damaged.

If it is, you CAN copy the system intact from the old drive to the new drive; new drive should come with a floppy based utility to do just that, or have one downloadable from THEIR website, but if the data on the old drive is suspect, you're better off doing a clean install onto the new drive, rather than copying over possibly corrupted files, then simply copying over your personal files. If those are corrupt, you can deal with them on an individual basis, rather than having a system that's unstable. You could copy the data then do a "repair" installation from the OS install disk, depending on what version of Windows you're using, but if there's damage to your other programs or 3rd party drivers that Windows can't restore, you may still have problems after the transfer.

What OS are you using? And what are your system specs? And how has the drive been "acting up" lately? That may give us some clues to what's going on. If the drive diagnostic comes up clean, we can try to help sorting out what's wrong from there.

 

Thanks, will give it a try and get back in touch if i still need help

 

looks like motherboard is a VIA Technologies Inc VT8366? does that sound right?

 

VT8366 would be the Northbridge chip (part of the chipset). Aida32 is a great free program you can download to ID your board. Install, run, then in the left pane go to Motherboard > Motherboard, in the right pane the value of Motherboard Name is what we need.

Also:

We need this info.

 

Originally Posted by G.T.
What OS are you using? And what are your system specs? And how has the drive been "acting up" lately?

Running Xp pro, specs - Maxtor 40gb hard drive, 256Mb DDR-SDRAM, AMD Athlon 1700x

Hard drive been makin buzzing noise and slow, screen keeps coming up with fixed boot drive failure on boot up

 

Motherboard Properties
Motherboard ID 12/20/2001-VT8366-8233-6A6LVJ1BC-00
Motherboard Name Jetway V266A

 

OK, took me awhile to find the Jetway homepage and when I did they didn't have any diagnostics

Here's some things you can do to narrow it down:

1. In BIOS, make sure your hard drive is in the Boot Order, if it isn't there put it in as first boot device and see if you can boot to it.

2. Since it's a Maxtor drive, you can use Powermax to test for errors. Download it and when you run it it will create a bootable floppy with diags and (I believe) repair utilities. Set your bios to boot from floppy and boot the system. After it finds and fixes errors see if you can boot from the drive.

3. If you still can't boot from the drive, then boot from your XP CD (set bios to boot from CD), and run the Recovery Console. Run chkdsk /r and then fixboot. Then try to boot from your hard drive.

Please post back and let us know how it goes.

 

Thanks Alanc, will give it a go. I also found their website but there wasnt anything useful on it.

 

Ask away if you have any questions

 

nickson2, I just noticed... had a brain fart last night. The diagnostic program you want will be at the hard drive maker's site, not the motherboard makers site. Sorry about that. Alanc caught it. For Maxtor, Powermax is what you want. Sorry about the confusion there.