PCTech Forums

Hi

Over the past month or 2 I had noticed a little click here and there coming from my harddrive, from the experience of past hard drives freezing up after hearing this clicks I thought it would be a good idea to run chkdsk to see if it would find any disk errors. I run chkdsk which then run through all stages fine until it reached the last one, it then sat about 15% from the end of the scan for hours. It was quite late so I went to bed expecting to wake up in the morning and it would be finished. When I checked it in the morning it was still in exactly the same position as the night before. I gathered it had crashed so turned it off and tried to reboot, it then said the disk was faulty. I used the vista disk to try a repair, it run chkdsk and said it had fixed the problem. Windows load bar comes up but then just goes to a black screen. I have tried everything to access windows but its just not happening.

I have removed the disk and put it an external case and linked to another laptop via usb. The disk shows up with a drive letter but when clicked it says "access is denied" I have looked in Computer management and used disk management to check the disks state of health, it says that all partitions are healthy. I used "recover my files program" to to see if files are there and it finds everything with no problems at all.

It seems that the disk is still intact but for some reason it has become unreadable in windows. Does anybody know if this is fixable and what steps I should take next?

Thanks in advance.

perrymsb,

You can use your Vista DVD to fix the startup problem for you.

Insert the Vista installation disc, or your Recovery Disc, into the CD or DVD drive and restart the computer.
If prompted, press any key to boot from the Vista installation DVD.
Select your language preferences and click on Next.
Click on Repair your computer.
Select which operating system you want to restore and then click on Next. If Vista is not listed here, or it is blank, then it is ok. Click on Next anyway.

Select the Startup Repair and wait, you should be prompted for a reboot.

If that doesn't work there are other things we can try to repair using the Vista DVD.

AS I said above I have already used the vista disk to repair. It run diskcheck and stated that it had fixed errors. Windows loadbar then comes up but goes to a black screen with just mouse cursor.
I have tried to repair again with vista disk but it just says that there are no errors found.

perrymsb,

Seeing as the "in-place upgrade" for vista can only be run from within windows itself and there is no error message to know what hive to replace then you might be out of luck.

You can use to build your own boot-able DVD, boot from the DVD and then copy your files to another location.