Hard drive wont boot, stalls on chkdsk

I have a hard drive for my Dell PC that stopped loading windows. The error message says missing hal.dll.

I put this hard drive into another computer and while BIOS detected the hard drive, at first it wasnt showing up in windows. I then did a chkdsk at startup which fixed errors but stalled before it finished. After startup, I can now see the hard drive in My Computer.

The problem is that I cant access My Documents to transfer my files. When I try to open the Documents folder in the problem hard drive, it stalls on me. Chkdsk also stalls when running it from command prompt. Help me fix this so I can safely transfer my files.

 

Try running chkdsk from Windows. My Computer>right-click the drive letter and select Properties>Tools tab>Check drive for errors. Tick both boxes and see if it will go through.

Which brand of HD is the problem drive?

 

Hi, thanks for helping me.

I have a samsung hard drive. I check samsung support website but I couldnt find any disk diagnostic tools.

I have run chkdsk from command prompt.

chkdsk /r

It is running through and correcting alot of errors. After this is done, what do I do next to get this hard drive working correctly? Do I have to reinstall windows?

 

Hello,
Here is the link to the Samsung Diagnostic Utility for your HDD. Use caution because you can mess things up if you are not careful. It comes as a FDD file only. You will have to create a bootable CD if you do not have a Floppy drive.

 

Hi,

That there are so many errors may be a problem getting XP to boot up. I think if chkdsk /r completes you should run it again to see if it will come up with zero errors. If it comes up with a lot of errors again then you will probably have to fully format the drive and reinstall Windows. If you can get chkdsk error free then you can try to boot it in the DELL and see what the error is (it may change from the hal.dll error).

As far as getting your files copied over to another HD. See what happens after chkdsk finishes. You may have better luck opening the drive if there are no filesystem errors.

You could also download a Live Linux CD such as Linux Mint and write it to CD as an image file using imgburn or similar burning software. You have to write it as an image file not a data file. Then boot from the Linux CD or USB thumb drive and see if you can access your files. Sometime Linux will let you access files even when Windows will not.

***
I did find Samsung diagnostic utilities but they are all for boot media. So they would have to be written to CD as an image file and booted to in order to run the utility. You would probably want the HUTIL program but you could check the model number of your HD against the lists. EDIT: tgell is correct the ES-Tool is the new drive utility the HUTIL is an older utility.

 

I think I will let the chkdsk /r finish. Then try to get as many files as I can off. Then run that Samsung ES Tool (The Drive Diagnostic Utility).

How do I best recover files from this hard drive? Does Recuva work?

 

I missed the fact that there is also a bootable cd file on that page I linked too.
ESTOOL301v_CDROM.zip You will have to burn the iso with something like Imgburn. Sorry.

 

I downloaded that file ESTOOL301v_CDROM.zip and have already burned it. I will let you guys know what happens after chkdsk /r is finished and I get no errors. I posted before I read sach2's reply. Good tips there, thanks to both of you.

 

Recuva is good.

You should leave the drive connected to your working PC and install Recuva on that PC. Then recover the files to that PC's HD.

PowerDataRecovery is also supposed to be good but may take longer to run. I believe the advantage to it would be that the files would be organized by folder so it may be easier to get your files if you are trying to copy whole folders.

 

I am not sure what happened. The hard drive stopped showing up around this time. Will run chkdsk /r again.

Recovering orphaned file a213fb4b-6a0a-4a45-a573-e9894df4dd72 (29470) into direc
tory file 48945.
Recovering orphaned file a213fb4b-6a0a-4a45-a573-e9894df4dd72 (29470) into direc
tory file 48945.
Insufficient disk space to recover lost data.
Insufficient disk space to recover lost data.
12 percent complete. (108 of 203 unindexed files scanned)
An unspecified error occurred (696e647863686b2e 17ea).

 

The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 2872 of name \WINDOWS\system32\config\SysEvent.Evt.
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 2873 of name \WINDOWS\system32\config\AppEvent.Evt.


What should I do now?

 

I am having back luck here. My hard drive is full, and I cant access My Documents.

 

I would try the Minitools Power Data recovery program. See if it can see your My Documents folder.

From memory is your damaged HD really so full that there is not room to save even a 1mb file? That seems unlikely. The AppEvent file should be really small. There is definitely corruption on the HD. I would jump to trying to recover the files that you can. Your My Document folder may be fine but it seems obvious that some of your system files are damaged. The /system32/config folder holds your Windows registry so it is looking very likely that your Windows installation will be too corrupted to boot again no matter what chkdsk can eventually accomplish.

 

Good news, the Minitools Power Data retrieved my document files well. I had plenty of space before chkdsk was run multiple times.

How do I check whether this hard drive is still usable? If I reformat, will it rid of all the HD corruption, or are there bad sectors on the drive?

 

I think it is basically taking a chance that there are relatively few bad sectors and they will be marked as bad during a full format.

How old is the drive? I would run the Samsung diagnostic and see what is tells you in the quick test. Does it say S.M.A.R.T. status is good or bad? If the SMART status is OK then you can probably reuse the drive for the OS. If the SMART status is bad you probably want to get a new HD for the OS.

If you have all your data that you want to recover copied, and a Windows CD to reinstall the OS you could fully reformat the drive and all bad sectors will be marked bad and not used. The low-level format option on the Samsung utility disc is more time-consuming as it writes a zero to each space on the HD--and it is a matter of opinion if it is better than just doing a full format. I do the low-level format on questionable drives but that is just me. [Realize that formatting destroys all data so once complete you no longer have any chance of recovering any further files]

Then install the OS and see how it goes. If you don't trust the drive then you can just fully format it and use it for large data files that are not critical to you or just toss it.