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Is My HDD Completely Dead? I/O Device Error
We have a Dell laptop Running Windows 7 Professional that has been a real workhorse. Just the other day it refused to boot, taking us into the Repair screen. On the repair screen that displays Windows installations it did show Windows 7 Professional (as the D: drive), but after 'repairing' for at least 90 minutes it ultimately said that the computer could be fixed by this method. I then got out my 64 bit W7 Pro disk and tried again with identical results. This time I went to the advanced options command prompt. When I entered D: at the prompt I got the dreaded request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
Undeterred, I removed the drive from the laptop and hooked it up as a slave to another computer. It popped up on other PC as the E: drive, but when I opened an administrative prompt and typed in E:, I got that same I/O error message.
Now I'm stumped. How is it that Windows shows up as a valid OS through the repairs, but the drive is inaccessible? I don't mind getting a new drive and reinstalling, but there's a fair amount of stuff that had never been backed up.
Additionally, I get this odd message when I try to perform a chkdsk without actually accessing the drive directly
Last edited by boweasel; 01 Nov 2016 at 16:01.