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[Sonic4Ever]

Hello everyone
I've been trying to repair my cousin's computer which has a serious hdd problem. On boot it would say something like "HARD DISK BOOT FAILED, INSERT DISK AND PRESS ENTER".
Using TestDisk I found that the partition was lost and recovered it. However Windows would not get past its own loading screen after that (just a black screen), and the next boot that disk boot failed stuff message showed up again.

So I recovered the partition again, and then I launched the windows vista repair cd to search for problems. It found a bad system volume information and fixed it with a chkdsk, and after rebooting windows vista started.

And unfortunately when my cousin rebooted his computer anew the hard disk boot failed message showed up again.

Does Who Dares Grins have any idea about this?  
Thanks

[e90]

Well it sounds like the disk is going then... might be a hardware problem not a software.

Question one - does it make clicking noises when it its stuck ? the clicks are quiet but still loud enough to hear if you turn everything in the room off.  If so you may need to knock the head back in line.... though that isnt' necessarilty a long term fix.

Question two - If you leave it for a few hours, then turn it on does it work and then have problems the longer it is left on? [1] And if so does it last a while before Windows crahses/has problems (leave on over night if necessary).  If so you may want to look for the freezer trick as the pads in the disk are failing and over heating.  Freezing the disk or 30 minutes will reduce the initial temperature meaning it takes longer to over heat, this should give you long enough in the OS to get the data off.

Question three - do you have another drive of similar of greater size? If it's just a physical bad sector in the boot area for example, and the disk/OS won't work around the bad sector like they are meant to (both have features to detect physical problems and mark them as unusable) you might want to install os to a new disk, recover files from there (I can't recommend Active@ recovery enough, I've seen it work where 10 others failed) then scrap the hard drive

Anything in event manager? SMART enabled in BIOS?  no recent damage to cable/pins?



[1] - the other symptom of this.. is that the first time you turn it on in the morning the computer will work for... 20 minutes without an issue, but then crashes.  You turn it back on and it lasts 3 minutes (may make login screen) but then crashes, you reboot it and it won't detect theOS at all.   

[claws]

e90 covers it I think ; definitely check the event logs, would replace the SATA? cable if possible since the cheapo ones can be awful (I have personally seen two go in succession) ... and don't forget to backup if you haven't already

[r007]

I'd suspect an old and/or badly written boot sector virus that keeps rewriting the darned thing.

Since the partition should in theory stay in the same place, you should just write down (or save) the partition table as it is after testdisk and save yourself the trouble of running it again and again. (If you're on a linux based rescue system sfdisk -d >saved-table.txt and sfdisk <saved.table are your friends.)

If a virus check doesn't procure anything obvious I'd start writing that installation off. The actual cause could be a million things along the boot process. Checking them all is really hard.
You'd try safe mode with everything off first I guess. If the error reoccurs then, it's not a 3rd party driver. Maybe a virus patched the kernel or some other driver?
If that works however, try (while in safemode) disabling everything non-system (services, drivers, you name it). Then start re-enabling until the problem occurs again. Voilà, the culprit is found.

[Power]

I'd say, get another HDD, install OS on it and boot with it. Use the problem disk as a secondary disk and access it. Save the data on the other disc and try wiping it out completely. Check for physical errors and see what happens. Either it's completely wasted or you'll be able to mark broken sectors as unusable and then you can use it again. I wouldn't recommend that, as it would probably fail eventually anyway.

[Sonic4Ever]

e90 covers it I think ; definitely check the event logs, would replace the SATA? cable if possible since the cheapo ones can be awful (I have personally seen two go in succession) ... and don't forget to backup if you haven't already

Unfortunately it takes so much time to get the windows partition back (only to get it lost after you quit windows!) that I fear I may not be able to try most of your advices e90.

Also the disk has 640 Go of data and I don't have anything bigger than this. Maybe we will try to keep just the important stuff if it comes down to this.

I'd suspect an old and/or badly written boot sector virus that keeps rewriting the darned thing.

Since the partition should in theory stay in the same place, you should just write down (or save) the partition table as it is after testdisk and save yourself the trouble of running it again and again. (If you're on a linux based rescue system sfdisk -d >saved-table.txt and sfdisk <saved.table are your friends.)

If a virus check doesn't procure anything obvious I'd start writing that installation off. The actual cause could be a million things along the boot process. Checking them all is really hard.
You'd try safe mode with everything off first I guess. If the error reoccurs then, it's not a 3rd party driver. Maybe a virus patched the kernel or some other driver?
If that works however, try (while in safemode) disabling everything non-system (services, drivers, you name it). Then start re-enabling until the problem occurs again. Voilà, the culprit is found.

I'm running testdisk from a linux livecd so i'm gonna try that

[e90]

Unfortunately it takes so much time to get the windows partition back (only to get it lost after you quit windows!) that I fear I may not be able to try most of your advices e90.

?

My three questions relate to tasks/operations that do not require the host OS to work

1 involves hitting the disk
2 involves freezing the disk
3 involves installing a new disk

None of these care if the HDD boots or not

[Sonic4Ever]

Yeah I'm sorry I misread what you said! Unfortunately hitting and freezing the disk didn't give any better result. We are going to install a new disk- while we bought a new one we asked the dude at the computer store to check the disk himself (i guess they have some sort of equipment to test stuff) and he said the read and write head is loose. I told him I could see the data after messing with testdisk but he doesn't think I can retrieve any data from it

I tried what r007 said aswell but not much luck. I tried to rewrite the mbr after recovering (again) the partitions but same problem. In fact I could restart the pc as much as I wanted to, but after a shutdown I'm always welcomed by the unfamous message