Boot Problems

Hello,

It has been a while since last posting here. Well here is the problem.

About 6 months ago, I purchased a used Toshiba laptop for a really good price. I cleaned it up removed a bunch of malware ..etc.. Since then I have had no problems until last week. At that time, I started to have hard drive problems, so I purchased a new harddrive and reinstalled it along with Windows XP. Following the reinstallation everything ran perfectly. This was about a week ago...

This morning I attempt to boot up and I get the message. The system will not boot past this message and a blank screen without booting from the Windows XP installation disk.

"A read disk error has occured. Press Ctrl + Alt+ Del to restart"

At the present time I am using the XP recovery console to check the disk but it is taking a long time. I have a few ideas based on some quick research and personal thoughs. Since this is the second one in a couple weeks, the HDD could be faulty or some component of my system is damaging the hard drive, or a boot file could be corrupted. Otherwise, I have no ideas but am working on it.

Anyone have problems like this in the past? Send me your thoughts.

Thanks in advance,
Momadu

 

Since the drive is new, it probably isn't broken. Try to reset your motherboard to the default settings. Get inside the BIOS and look for something like 'load optimized defaults' or 'Load Fail-Safe Defaults' and execute that. Now run chkdsk /p on your drive and see if the problem persists.

 

Thanks for the help.

After running chkdsk it appears that the hard drive has problems. I attempted to reinstall windows and the program indicated that it was unable to format and partion the disk. It looks like the disk has been damaged...

thanks again.