For the past couple of days I've been getting a message during the BIOS boot process saying "Disk Error Occurred / Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart."
Then it would usually boot up after a few tries, but today it took about 30 tries. After those 30 tries I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order and then after a few more tries it finally booted up, but that's probably just be a coincidence. Sometimes it would automatically launch DiskCheck with a message saying "Checking File Systems / One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency." When it failed to boot up after this I ran Disk Check again and checked the box "Automatically Fix File System Errors" and as it ran the program I could see it fixing things such as, "Deleting Corrupt Attribute Record" but obviously this didn't work.
There were a few other strange incidences before this problem appeared. My daughter told me that YouTube was not working (no videos would play) and I discovered that my Flash Player had been corrupted. When I tried to fix it, it gave me a lot of grief, with the Adobe webpages freezing up and having to reinstall it a couple of times before it would work properly. At the same time there were a few other programs behaving strangely but now everything seems to be back to normal, aside from the disk error issue.
Beside Disk Check, which didn't seem to do anything, is there anything else I can do to solve this problem or should I just take it as a sign that my hard drive is failing? Should I try to run the diagnostic tools that came with the drive?
Windows XP Home Edition SP3
AMD Athlon(tm) 64X2 Dual
Core Processor 5200+
2.71 GHz / 3.25 GBRAM
could also be bad sata motherboard controller as ran into similar issue with a customer. after reloading windows, replaced sata cable, replaced ram & psu, it finally showed on post screen no boot drive found. replaced sata with ide drive & no problem since.
Back up the drive before you have a catastrophic failure with a 3rd party BU utility. Personally I use Acronis. I back-up once a week. I don't have much new data to back-up so every seven days works. Don't trust system restore. If the drive dies the info is gone. I disabled SR because it is basically useless.
Sometimes when a you are encountering HD failure. The drive will corrupt files on it's way out. You are lucky it will boot at all.
Jeff
All of my files, aside from system and program files, are currently backed up so at least I'm safe there. I agree with you that System Restore is basically a joke. I remember that at one time it did work as described but now, no matter which Restore Point I choose, it won't allow me to go back.
When I initially did a search on this I came across a few other people that recommended replacing the ribbon cables. Could it be that simple? The thing that's frustrating me the most is that I'm having all this trouble booting up my PC but once I'm up and running everything seems normal. My programs run without incident and I have yet to come across any corrupted files. Then, when I run my disk diagnostic applications nothing is amiss, but maybe that's all irrelevant and my hard drive is slowly failing in the background.
If you haven't touched the inside of the PC lately, I doubt the cables are the problem.
Swap out the hard drive to see if the problem goes away. If it does then the HD is the problem.
Hard drives are cheap these days. It is a good idea to have one on hand for such a problem.
Ribbon cables? Must be PATA.
Backup the whole partition not just files unless you want to do a fresh installation.
You will have to dig up key codes and the like.
Jeff
