Hard Drive Failure

[Dennis_27]

How do I get my hard drive to boot up after receiving this message? "Failure to read drive C: Please choose on of the following: Retry, Ignore or Fail." NO LUCK after doing each one. Any suggestions appreciated.

[harry d brown jr]

You need to boot from a floppy, then run chkdsk on C:. Your drive is probably shot.

live free or die
harry

[Jill in Oakland]

I do not work in IT, or any tech field for that matter, but I don't think it necessary to interpret the message, "Failure to READ drive C" as a complete hard drive failure, though I admit I freaked the first time I saw this message.

Sometimes the necessary Autorun, Config, or Command files get corrupted or otherwise messed up after a crash or major system change. Sometimes they are mistakenly deleted by the user.

When I received the "Failure..." msg,(and after quite a bit of research) I booted from floppy into command prompt, then typed "SYS C:", which I had read would copy some necessary startup files from the floppy disk to my hard drive.

After a few seconds, received message, "Files transferred" (or similar msg). Shut down by "Ctrl+Alt+Del". (I'm not sure, but I wonder if just doing a "Sys C:" is sometimes enough to restore or fix whatever might be corrupted, and allow a normal boot.) As for me...

After shutting down, waited a few seconds, then booted again with floppy to command prompt and ran "fdisk" (I had partitioned my HD), then closed again. Last, I rebooted again with floppy to command prompt, ran "format" of my C drive, after which I was prompted to install my desired OS.

This very first incident and its scary but successful resolution is what finally allowed me enough courage to get to know my computer and not fear it.

[Jill in Oakland]

P.S.
I am aware that complete reformatting of one's HD is considered FAILURE of said drive, so my reply will probably not merit me much respect with the truly technical savvy. I was merely responding to "hard drive is probably shot", which is very scary to novices and, in my mind, reads as "you need a new one".

to ask is to act...

Jill

[John-Thomas Gaietto]

I would boot from a floppy boot disk run scandisk /all /autofix, I then run scandisk /all /surface if my problems were not resolved however THIS WILL TAKE A WHILE DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF THE DISK. Also try fdisk /mbr this restores the master boot record. Hope this helps...