Bad hdd...Possible Read/Write problem

Megadeth4168

I have a client that said that they rebooted their computer this morning after a Windows Update and now they are getting a Disk Read failure.

I show up and see the BIOS sees the Drive (SATA) and that there are no CD's or floppies in the machine. So, I throw in my trust UBCD for WIndows. Once UBCD starts to inspect Hardware it stops reading from the CD and the screen just goes black.

The same thing happens with a Windows XP CD and just for the heck of it a Windows 2003 CD.
Oh yeah, I put in a Windows2k CD (knowing full well I don't have SATA drivers for it) and it boots.

So I run the Dell utility partition and run the diagnostics and everything claims to be fine. Obviously everything is not fine.

So, for the heck of it, I go into system setup and disable SATA 0 and then I am able to boot from the CD's again.

I found it to be interesting that I cannot boot from CD's while this (possibly) bad Hard drive is attached.

For now, I will be throwing in a spare hard drive and image the system, but I was wondering if someone here knew of a way to work around this.

Thanks.

Mishra

Try using the hard drive in another system and see if it boots.

JDMurray

If the drive boots in another machine and passes CHKDSK, it's likely the drive controller or some other component of the first machine is bad, or there was a bad driver update. In that case, you can try rolling back to a previous Windows restore point before the update and check if that fixes it.

Megadeth4168

Ok... Here is an update. So far nothing has worked out on this drive except one trick that I've used in the past but don't really recommend doing. That is, physically unplug the SATA connection to the drive during the Windows Setup CD (Inspecting hardware) and then to plug the drive back in one it actually gets into the Setup.

Now I am in recovery console and I am performing a CHKDSK /P /R.

I think it's obvious why I don't recommend the above solution. I am doing this on a test machine, so no worries. I just now have to wait until the CHKDSK finishes.