New install of XP on "troubled" system

Status
Not open for further replies.

gospel

In Runtime
Messages
139
Fixing a friend's pc that her son left at home when he moved out. She told me she thought it has a virus on it and wanted me to just wipe the drive clean and do a fresh install of XP home. Everything was going fine until the first time that the system reboots when installing XP. It restarts goes to the "finishing setup" screen then locks down. I went into recovery mode and ran chkdsk and it says that the disk has "unrecoverable errors". Does this mean that the hard drive is shot physically or could this be fixed by placing the drive into my machine as a second drive and running scandisk on it?
 
nitestick said:
i would say the drive is shot if following a format you receive this error. format again and make sure it is a full format. take the time to run a surface test as well.

I did the full format and tried to install XP several times. A few times I got the BSOD in which it told me that a HD was not detected or there were problems with it along with other cryptic stuff I don't understand. Other times it would seem as if it was going to install but get almost to the last part where it says "installing start menu items" and reboot right back to the Windows setup screen and start the install process all over again. After re-formatting several times chkdsk would still say "one or more unrecoverable errors".

Is there a way to scan the disk surface from C:\ in the recovery process or would putting it in my machine as a second hard drive and running scandisk be the best option?
 
uzi9mm said:
keywords = she THOUGHT that she had a virus

Did any A/V virus notifications come up?

She didn't know. She just said that her son downloaded a lot of songs and porn and then said that the computer would not come on.
What I got when first turned it on was a NTDLR file not found. I know this loads the OS and without it there will be no boot. This is when I ran the recovery disk the first time, but then got the above mentioned problems.
 
uzi9mm said:
maybe it was a coinicidence that he downloaded porn and the computer died.

Very possible.

After a little more research I found out I can run the recovery program and do chkdsk/f and it will attempt to fix the drive problems. Also Maxtor (it is a Maxtor drive) has a program called Powermax that you can download and burn an ISO from that you can boot to and scan the drive. I'm gonna do these two things and if they don't work I'll just consider the drive toast. I don't know anything else to do.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom