Getting "crashed" hard drive to boot

[buckdog05]

I am working with a computer that was stuck in an endless loop in the Windows XP Boot menu, in other words, when the power button was pressed, the Windows XP Loading Screen would appear for a few seconds, than a screen would come up asking if I wanted to start the computer in safe mode, normally, or use the last known configuration. All the options were tried and the computer always would go back to the boot menu.

I had seen this problem before, and have fixed it before by using CHKDSK from the Windows XP Recovery Council so I inserted my Windows XP disk and tried this and a half-hour later the computer still was having the same problem.

I also tried doing "fixmbr," but decided against it after the prompt told me that it may make the data on the hard drive inaccessible (oh, and I forgot to mention that the user of this computer did NOT back up his files and that he uses the computer for his business).

I figured that I would have to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows to make the computer work so I hooked the hard drive up to an external USB 2.0 enclosure attached to a working computer running Windows XP. When I double clicked on the drive (that came up as "local disk") in My Computer, I got an error message stating that there was a problem with the "inpage operation." I did some research on "inpage operations," and figured out that something was probably wrong with the hard drive.

I than found a free program called "testdisk," that sounded like it could fix my problem, so I tried writing a new boot record with testdisk and the hard drive would still not come up in explorer, although I now get an error saying that the disk is not formatted and that asks me if I would like to format the disk. I tried looking for lost partitions and than saving the partition table back to the disk but still had no luck.

Next, I decided to run chkdsk again through the command prompt (making sure to run it as "chkdsk g: r\" to make it run on the right disk and this time got a long line of "File Record Segment X is unreadable" followed by a shorter line of "inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 25." On the first line of errors, there would be a few consecutive "segments," than it would skip some and would display more consecutive segments.

After this the hard drive would still not open in explorer, so I decided to run a program called "photorec" that came in the same zip file as "testdisk," and claims to be able to recover lost files form hard drives. It is running right now, has already found hundreds of pictures and documents (which is great), and estimates 9 hours to finish.

My question is, is there any way to boot to the drive without reformatting and reinstalling Windows, and if I do reformat and reinstall, is the disk safe to use or is is likely to crash again?

Of course I am highly recommending a backup solution to prevent hassles like this in the future.

Thanks a ton and sorry for the superlong message!

[puntoMX]

My question is, is there any way to boot to the drive without reformatting and reinstalling Windows, and if I do reformat and reinstall, is the disk safe to use or is is likely to crash again?

That drive I would not even use as a paper weight, for real, get yourself a new one, or in this case the guy from whom the drive belongs. Drives are cheap these days and properly more speedy than the drive that "crashed".

[schloss]

I agree.

Even Microsoft point out that the most common source of "Error Performing Inpage Operation" is physical problems with the disk. It's a very misleading message due to a quirk in the way Windows copies files of < 256kB.

Recover whatever files you can, then junk the drive.