One of our kids' laptops stopped booting a couple of days ago. I have confirmed there is nothing wrong with the laptop itself; it's a hard drive issue.
To narrow this down I have:
Placed the offending hard drive in an external drive enclosure attached to another computer. The other computer can access the entire drive with no issues.
Attempted to use the rescue disc to repair the windows installation. The rescue operation indicated there was something wrong with the startup settings, but couldn't write the changes.
Again with the rescue disc, ran the startup repair sequence. I should mention that the Windows installation could not be detected automatically by the rescue disc. Anyway, the diagnostic & repair details, for the "Disk Failure diagnostics" indicate a Bad Hard Disk
While in the recovery console, I opened up a command prompt and went to D:\ which is the offending disk path. I'm able to run a directory listing on, and navigate around within the drive that is supposed to be "bad".
With these outcomes, I'm completely confused by the fact that the drive appears to be able to be accessed, yet no OS installation is able to be found by the recovery routine. I've checked the recycle bin to see if someone accidentally erased critical files but the recycle bin is empty.
What do you find folks think is going on with this situation?
TIA!
Sounds like the file system contains corruption or you have bad sectors on the drive. Recommend navigating to the drive again in command prompt. Type the following.
chkdsk /r D:
Run the disk check multiple times if it says it fixed any file system errors. Run it until it says it found no problems with the disk.
My Computer
At a glance
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 BitIntel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz6.00 GB Hundai HMT125U6BFR8C-H9ATI Radeon HD 4850
Computer Manufacturer/Model Number
HP Pavilion e9110t
OS
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
CPU
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz
Motherboard
Pegatron IPIEL-LA3
Memory
6.00 GB Hundai HMT125U6BFR8C-H9
Graphics Card(s)
ATI Radeon HD 4850
Sound Card
Realtek High Definition Audio/ATI High Definition Audio
Monitor(s) Displays
Acer AL2216W
Screen Resolution
1680x1050
Hard Drives
Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 ATA Device 500 GB
PSU
Unknown/installed by HP
Case
HP generic case
Cooling
Intel Stock Cooling
Keyboard
HP Keyboard
Mouse
HP Mouse
Internet Speed
Download: 19.15 Mbps Upload: 1.67 Mbps
Other Info
Network Adapter Realtek RTL8168D/8111D Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)
Network Adapter 802.11n Wireless PCI Express Card LAN Adapter
Well it's fixed! I ran chkdsk /r and that found a bad sector on a font. Then ran chkdsk /F and that came up clean. I then ran the recovery console and it found something goofy with the hard drive startup sequence. I ran that sequence again after a boot/bcd issue cropped up and holy smokes it's all good again!
Not sure why that all happened but I'm happier than a pig in slop that it's fixed - thanks!
