Hard Drive troubleshooting ?

When you see the "Welcome To Setup" screen, you will see the options below

This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft
Windows XP to run on your computer:

To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.

To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.

To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.
# Press Enter to start the Windows Setup.

To setup Windows XP now and Repair Install , press ENTER. do not choose "To repair a

Windows XP installation using the Recovery Console, press R", (you Do Not want to load Recovery Console). I repeat, do not choose "To repair a Windows XP installation using the Recovery Console".
# Accept the License Agreement and Windows will search for existing Windows installations.
# Select the XP installation you want to repair from the list and press R to start the repair.
# Setup will copy the necessary files to the hard drive and reboot. Do not press any key to boot from CD when the message appears. Setup will continue as if it were doing a clean install, but your applications and settings will remain intact.

If all goes well, your installation will complete and you will re back where you were before this nightmare began, but if not, a clean drive and a reinstall will be your only option.Rather than format your drive and add excess wear to the head, platter and spindles you will simply run the XP CD and when it comes time to choose a partition, you will choose to delete the existing partition, make a new partition, then do a (Quick) NTFS format. This will allow you to do a hard drive recovery later if you choose to do so, without destroying the data you may want to restore with a hard drive recovery tool.

Continue the install and have the Driver Recovery CD ready after windows boots to reinstall your drivers. You can usually put this in the drive and let windows find it and install the drivers from there. Some driver recovery programs can do this with a single click and reinstall for you.

Now all that's left to do is copy those files on the other PC to your newly installed Windows partition and drag the files to where they belong from the saved folder on the other PC's Desktop.

The End of the Tale

If none of what has been written so far applies to you, and your hard drive is clicking like a mad castanet player, there is yet one method that may save you AND your data.That clicking sound is a head servo seeking either the park position or the end position of your drive, or it could just be emulating Tom and Jerry, who really cares at this point?
What we want it to do, is pipe down and do it's job. Most people will trash a drive at this point, and I can definitely see why, since it may well be a lost cause. But this is not always the case.

Sometimes your drive may just have a malfunctioning chip on the control board and THAT, my dear friends, can be replaced.

The only real trick here is to find a drive exactly like yours and swap the control boards, save the data as per the procedures above, swap them back and use the new drive.

Having tried everything listed above, and even some things below you may still have a drive that simply doesn't function as you know it should. This is the time for that Manufacturers CD I mentioned at the beginning of the article. That process is as simple as booting the PC from the CD with the faulty drive in place and following the on-screen instructions. Run ALL the tests, and if the errors just keep on coming, you can trash that drive, confident in the fact that you did everything possible to try to save it.

Good Luck Future PC Techs
And Remember, be an honest Tech or Just don't bother.

Bob

Caution This article May be subject to bouts of editing or whimsy without a moments notice.