Firstly, some system facts:
Gigabyte 8Ik1100 R2 m/board
Windows XP SP3, SP3 installed for 3 weeks
Was re-formatted and re-installed about 1 year ago.
120GB SATA1 HDD, single partition
1.5GB RAM
HDD nearly full, maybe 10GB free.
AVG free and Zonealarm free.
ADSL modem netcomm nb1300
IDE DVD, parallel scanner and printer.
Last night my teenage daughter reported that “the toolbar was not working” while she was on MSN and Limewire. She shut it down and I tried to boot. The error reported was along the lines of “windows failed to start… a hardware or software change may have caused this…” and giving options for safe mode, normal boot, last known good config etc. I tried these several times then gave up.
The hard disk controller check seemed OK in the BIOS check, and it started the XP scrolling screen, the bar scrolled across for a few times then reverted to the error screen again. I could hear and see the HDD doing some activity in this time.
I decided to try the Bart PE boot cd. This booted correctly, but when I tried to run the A43 file management utility, it went into an endless lopp trying to access the hard drive, with the activity LED coming on on each loop but nothing else.
This morning I booted again with Bart PE and began a chkdsk which is still running at home and I will check tonight. In the index checking stages it found some “file record segment 15232 is unreadable” with 4 errors. Then it began deleting some index entries.
So my question is what general or specific things to do next with the objective of resurrecting the system or at least recovering the data ready for a complete re-install?
