Bad Sectors, Boot Death

System is WinXP, 1Gb RAM, GeForce FX5200, P4 2ghz.

I get to the WinXP loading screen, and it dies with a flash of the blue screen. I've attached it to my own system as a slave, and after a scan by XP it says the disk has 12kb in bad sectors. Any ideas on repair?

 

In addition, I cannot boot into safe mode. It dies there as well. Will I be able to use a util such as maxblast?

 

did u recently re-install any drivers? i had a problem just like this when i (attempted) to reinstall my IDE controller... had to reinstall XP

 

When the brown stuff hits the fan. Just reinstall. It makes computers a lot happier. If after reinstalling windows you still have a problem i would say the HD might be junk. How old is the drive? drive specs?

 

Okay. I haven't done anything with drivers lately. And the drive is not that old. It's a Maxtor 80Gb. And I'm not going to just reinstall windows, that's just stupid from my point of view unless I simply cannot fix the drive, period. And I'm sure this can be fixed, so I'm not even going to go there.

 

You have got to be kidding. He has bad sectors. Plus, he isn't using the OS from that drive to see his files. Its a second drive. This is so not a software issue.

If you have bad sectors, there isn't a lot you can do aside from having the OS mark them as bad and not use them. IMO, thats just ignoring iminent drive failure. Get the data off of there before more go bad and if the drive is under warranty, get it replaced.

I've heard a low level format can help, but I don't believe that for one second.

 

Thank you, Adrynalyne. I'll shut it down and disconnect the drive, and let 'em know what the problem is.

..Ack, likely time to prepare for a new compy.

 

Well, that means... can I get some help on pulling Address Book entries from MS Outlook? There's a lot of important stuff in there.

 

Do a search on that drive for any .pst files. Thats what Outlook will save them in.

 

Crap... how about Outlook Express?

 

Address book:

*.wab

Folders:

*.dbx

 

Just some good info on BAD sectors:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1583&page=3