What is the best way to check a harddrive for problems?

[bigmouk]

A laptop wont boot up here. You can hear the harddrive ticking away inside like it is going no where then it just resets itself and goes through the same process again.

Think the laptop is about 1 year old.

Can read the drive ok when i put in my desktop with a notebook drive adapter.

Just wondering if it could be another problem with the laptop somewhere.

???

 

[Adams_16v]

sounds like a driver problem, press F8 as its booting just after the post screen and try going into it in safe mode!

 

[ReNWiLL]

Hard drives do not have drivers so to speak the run on a generic driver built into the cmos/bios. Could be a corrupt boot sector on the hard drive. When you use it in your desktop are you actually booting from the drive or using it as a slave device ?. It could be many things from a wrongly initiated/configured bios setting thru a virus thru bad sectors, to a failed ide controller chip (very unlikely). There are many different ways of testing for these things. More info needed if you could.

Regards,

Bill.

 

[Adams_16v]

sorry, i didnt mean drivers for the HDD, i presumed he meant it rebooted itself during windows boot up.

Im guessing it doesnt even get to this stage?

 

[The Hoff]

Hmm sounds dodgy mate. Tap F8 on boot up and boot into command prompt if it will allow you too. Then try and write a new mbr (master boot record). You can also run chkdsk from there too which should give an indication of any problem clusters.

Failing that go into your BIOS and change the CD to first booted drive, then use your XP cd and boot using that. Then attempt the repair mode.

Failing all of that put the HD in your usual desktop and get yourself a copy of O-O Defragmenter and run that on it. Then if still no good, just back-up your data and reformat the drive.

Unfortunately they are a pig when they go wrong...

 

[bigmouk]

Sorted. It was corrupted system files.

Managed to get all the user files from it using the adapter.

Ran the restore cd and its working fine again now. Just concerned because i dont know why this happened in the first place ?!?