[political]

Dear All,

(Firstly, allow me to apologise for being yet another ignorant "Average Joe" who has never contributed anything to a tech forum in my life, yet comes here crying for help when something goes badly wrong - I have sworn that I will donate to this forum if somebody can successfully assist!)

(Let me also emphasise that, although I have a general understanding of what is going on and can follow instructions reasonable well, I am not great with particular terminology.)

For reference, I am using a Dell Dimension 9200 bought exactly two years ago.

Basically XP will not boot, plain and simple - not even in any of the safe modes or in "last known good configuration".

My first port of call was the Dell Diagnostics CD that came with my system - I tried using the problem tree to pinpoint a specific test for my problem. I ended up running tests for "Cannot Boot the OS".

Everything seemed fine until it reached the tests for the SATA Hard Drive. The Confidence Test passed ok, but when the follwing test was taking place:

SATA Disk. S/N = S09QJIML911082 - Device Quick Check

The testing froze, and I encountered the follwing message:

Fatal Error TNT. 10049: Out of stack buffers, CS: EIP are in error values :
Error ocurred in real mode, exception/interrupt number 0071h
Err values = 0000D100h 000003F9h
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
Command or filename not recognized
F:\DIAGS\DIM32\A1276>

Now, obviously that means there is an issue with my hard drive - something corrupt or damaged. However, for piece of mind, I also ran the Express Test that tests the most crucial components of the entire system.
Again, when it reached the SATA tests, I experienced the following:

Error Code 0F00 : 065D
Msg: IDE device failed. The self-test failed the read portion of the test.

(I know that this CD is now two years out of date, so I also downloaded the latest Diagnostics file for my model from the Dell support website and burnt it to a DVD, however that DVD did not seem to work when I tried to boot my system from it.)




OK - I hope I haven't bored anybody with all that, but this is the part where I am looking for some advice. I know now to expect some level of data corruption (and thus, data loss), but want to know what I can do to minimise this and potentially correct the problem. I am prepared to go the distance rather than give up and just replace my hard drive.

Does anybody recommend the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows? (http://www.ubcd4win.com) or indeed any good user-friendly methods of working around problems like this and trying to recover unharmed data?

I'm also hoping that some of my data will remain unaffected because of my partitions (with all Windows and system files being on C: and most of my data files stored on D:


Any advice or help would be appreciated beyond words...

[Hybr!d]

When hard drives fail the only option is to send them to a lab for repair.

If the drive is detected you can try software repairs on it, but if it does not show in your BIOS or in Windows no software of any type will fix a hardware fault.

EG: http://www.datatrack-labs.co.uk/

Free collection, delivery and quote. Expect to pay £150-£500 depending on parts neeeded etc.

I am not affiliated with this company but do use them for my customers.

Or just get a new drive and start again.

[political]

Hi Dave,

Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond to my problem.

Sorry, should have mentioned - it DOES show in my bios, and as mentioned, the diagnostic "confidence test" passes ok, so it knows it's there (which I guess is good news...). That is why I am hoping I could sort something myself.

I've been reading about how to recover data using software that involves consistency checking, and was wondering if anybody can give me any valid info on this (if that is indeed the best route to go down...)

Thanks again.

[Hybr!d]

Good start, next thing is to remove the drive and plug it into a working machine, then run Windows error checking on it.

Or if you only have one machine, get a new drive, install Windows then add the old drive and error check.

Either way you need a new drive as using the old one that has already shown fault to run Windows will only damage it more.

[political]

Hmmm.... I had thought about doing this (I do have another computer I can test this on), but was worried about compatibility issues - how will another computer "accommodate" a corrupt hard drive alongside its original healthy one, with two separate installations of Windows working alongside each other?

Thanks for the continued support.

[Hybr!d]

Yes, if the drive is healthy and fitted correctly, set up in BIOS etc it will work fine.

Having corruption and another windows install is irrelevant, it will just show up in My Computer as a second drive.

You then right click it, property's, error checking, make sure fix file system errors is checked, then GO.

[philthomas]

You could try removing the drive, fitting a new one and reinstalling XP.

Then either add the current drive to a spare SATA port or put it in an external USB enclosure and see if you can retrieve anything from it. You will need a new drive anyway, so you have nothing to lose by trying.

[political]

So essentially, the corrupted files that are preventing XP from booting at the moment won't matter, because they will be provided by the healthy hard drive on this second computer. Then I will be able to access all intact files on the corrupt drive simply through Windows Explorer as per normal? (as well as performing an error check).

(forgive my terminology...)

[Hybr!d]

Correct, that is the theory and is normally the case.

You are running Windows off a healthy drive so any problems or corruption on the second slave drive are irrelevant.

However, just because the drive shows in the BIOS does not mean it will show in Windows, even if it shows in Windows it may still crash when you try to access it and get the data.

This is all worth a shot but don't get you hopes up, I do this all the time and normally a drive that plays up is a dead drive.

[philthomas]

sorry Dave I didn't see your post above .....
@ Political ... ignore my post