TonyD

did my hard drive crash? and some other questions.

ok to start i have a compaq presario with a 40 gig hard drive. or at least i did.

the other day it shut itself off then rebooted.
when it came back on it was displaying what looked like maybe dos, i dont know because i am truly a novice on this type of thing.
anyway the windows xp screen never came back on.

so i rebooted again and nothing.
so i put the compaq restore cd in to see what it would do and after running for a minute or so a big red screen came on that said call compaq for service, or something close to that wording.

so i did but since it is out of waranty they wanted me to pay $30 just to try and help with what was wrong.
she wouldnt even answer any simple questions i may have had.
like can i replace the hd with a new store bought one and how do i get back all the installed programs onto the new hd.

so does this sound like a hd crash?

what is the risk of my buying another hd and installing it? if that isn't the problem are hard drives returnable if i can't use it?

what happens to all the programs that origionally came with the computer? are they on the restore cd?
i had norton and was always updated so i shouldnt have had any virus but what if i do. how do i know?
becausee it will likely destroy anything else going on this pc.

any advice would be hugely helpful.

td

My "B" button rarely works.
My measley attempt at a Blog--> What Did He Say?
Movies watched 2008 Watching a Mits 73831 DLP Arnold is here

TonyD

ok the last thing i could get to before the red screen popped up, was something that had an option to go to the last known working configuration.


but when i clicked it, nothing happened.

My "B" button rarely works.
My measley attempt at a Blog--> What Did He Say?
Movies watched 2008 Watching a Mits 73831 DLP Arnold is here

Glenn Overholt

Suck city! I feel for you. Never had a Compaq, but here are a few ideas to try out in the meantime.

You might have a boot disk with an option to just go to dos. If that works, you should see (between the quote marks) "C>:" Type in "dir" and press enter. You should see a list of files with how big they are and when they were made. If anything on the screen is not in English, then your drive probably crashed.

Your rescue CD might have an option to format your drive, but if you do that, everything will be erased.

Another thought - and this may or may not work. At the C prompt, type in "FDISK /mbr" and press return. This resets the master boot record and might fix things.

I hope someone else here knows more about your model. As for hard drives, try to get a return for it if it does not work, and if it does not work, there may be something wrong with your motherboard.

Glenn

Evan.G

You might use that fdisk /mbr command as a last option.

Compaq is infamous for having these system restore discs shipped w/ the system. They require original spec hardware to run. You would have an hd that matched the original. If you get a generic version of windows, you could use any hd from a store. Many store allow you to return something w/in a short period w/ no fee.

KyleS

This is true for the most part but a different hard drive size or brand shouldnt make a difference in whether or not the restore disc will work (Changing the motherboard could).

Before going to buy another hard drive you could at least reformat the hard drive and see if it will reload the OS. Of course you would lose all of your information but you would be doing the same thing by buying a new HD.

KyleS

Evan.G

"Before going to buy another hard drive you could at least reformat the hard drive"

That's a good point. I once had a hard drive that a virus had ruined. Messing around with the bood record or fat didn't help. It was unreadable, but I could reformat it and start from scratch.

Cees Alons

Formatting the drive would be the very last option before buying a new one (or a new PC). When my drive would crash, I would abandon it as fast as I could after I recovered everything I could still get off it. So rescuing the information would be priority number one (and almost the only objective).

If everything else fails, another possibility might be to buy a new disk (if you're sure everything else seems to work in your PC), install it as the first disk (and keep your current one as a second HD) and put the OS on the new one. Then you could try to recover your current disk.

Of course, if no valuable information is on your disks (except the OS), all that trouble wouldn't be necessary.

And, please, make sure it is the HD. Glen's suggestion about the MBR is very valuable, BTW! Try to get a system on a CD (you may have to set the CD as a boot device in the PC-setup first) or a floppy (probably DOS in this case). That way you can try to inspect the HD and at the same time see if the PC as a whole is functioning.


Cees

TonyD

i would love to try any of these ideas but as of now all can get to show up are "non system disk or disk error replace and strike any key when ready"

and when i hit f-12 at restart i get "58 301-keyboard error"telling me to plug in or replace my keyboard.
on the bottom it says network service boot.

when i hit the f-1 option from this screen i get an error message....
"pxe-e61 media test failure check caBLE"

i can no longer get the c> or a> to come up.

My "B" button rarely works.
My measley attempt at a Blog--> What Did He Say?
Movies watched 2008 Watching a Mits 73831 DLP Arnold is here

TonyD

ok i was some able to get to c:> but typing in fdisk or fdisk/mbr did nothing.

My "B" button rarely works.
My measley attempt at a Blog--> What Did He Say?
Movies watched 2008