How screwed am I?

T61/XPpro, about 18 months old, working fine till this morning. Strange behavior leading eventually to having to shut the machine down hard with the power switch. Blue screen error on reboot: unmountable_boot_drive. Repeated.

Used ThinkVantage utilities to run hard disk diagnostics, which reported error 0000: controller read verification failure. (I may be paraphrasing). Lenovo manual says it's time to replace the drive.

OK, I haven't begun to research how painful the restore process is going to be, but since there are no Msft installation disks I fear the worst. But before proceeding further I have one question: Is it possible that this problem can be solved without replacing the drive? I have a Rescue and Recovery disk (and pretty decent data backup on an external drive). Is there any reason not to attempt a restore? Is there anything I should attempt before restoring? Or is the hardware diagnostic error definitive? Doesn't the diagnostic itself live on the disk?

TIA,
Richard

 

I'm can't think why that would hurt. After all, it ain't working now. I wouldn't trust it to work longterm, though.

 

This most commonly occurs when a computer is hard shut down and there is slight corruption in the filesystem's innards. Its possible its an issue with your HDD (but I've had issues with some disk diagnostics giving false positives.) If you already have a data backup, then there is no downside to the below method.

To fix it (most of the time), boot into your Vista DVD, or recovery console if you have it. On the Vista DVD, choose "Repair", and go to the command prompt. Type (without quotes) "chkdsk C: /r". Let it run, and reboot after its done (might take a while).

If you can get back into windows afterwards, press windows key, and type "eventvwr.msc", then hit enter. On the left, select windows logs, then system. Scroll through the logs, and check for alot of entries that have a source of "ntfs", "disk", or "atapi". If you want, you can save the logs "Save all events as..." (on the right), and upload them, and I'll take a look at em'. If there are alot of the above entries, and they're spread across a wide range, then the drive is probably dead.

Keep in mind, that it is possible that something else locked up the computer and caused filesystem corruption, and it is also possible the drive is dying and that is what locked up the computer. So long as you have a backup, you have nothing to lose.

 

If you still have issues you can try:

Boot off the Windows CD and select "r" to Repair the OS.

Run C:\fixboot
Run C:\fixmbr
Run chkdsk /r

If you cannot see the drive on a repair, you may have to pop the drive out and put it in another machine (if it is a sata notebook drive) or in an enclosure and repair it from there or as a last resort pull what you can off.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I'm not doing too well, though. When I try booting from the rescue and recovery disk, I get the Rescue and Recovery 4 splash screen and a cursor, but nothing that seems to be clickable. The ThinkVantage button doesn't have any effect either at that point, though it does take me into Bios config when booting from C:. I can't even boot into safe mode from the C: drive.

I don't know if I am missing something obvious or if my machine is simply hosed. Advice welcome.

Thanks.

 

Even with a good harddrive RnR sits there forever with that splash screen and the cursor before starting up. No message, nothing moving.

So if it is now also dealing with a slightly defective drive it might need a lot of time.

 

Ah, OK. I'll just let it sit there and see what happens.

So what should I expect to see eventually?

 

Hmm...I dunno. There's no disk activity at all...the HD and DVD are both quiet. Just the splash screen and cursor. What the hell is it thinking about?

 

Well, it sat there for over an hour with no sign of life, so I shut it down. Looks like the C: drive is toast.

 

You will have to resort to popping the HDD out and connecting it to another machine (vista machine).

You said strange behaviour... exactly what strange behavviour did you see? Maybe your drive was going bad.

 

It started when I tried to eject an external USB drive. The eject device icon in the system tray would not open. Note: this is an XP-Pro machine, not Vista. I thought that was odd, so I opened an Explorer window, and it was empty, except for the crap around the edges. I tried to close the Explorer window, but couldn't. Got the Program Not Responding popup. I killed Explorer, and the desktop vanished. On the very rare occasion I have done that in the past, Explorer restarted automatically, but this time it didn't and the machine was completely unresponsive. I did a hard shutdown, disconnected the USB drive and restarted. That's when I got the first BSOD. I checked the USB drive on another machine and it seems to be fine, BTW.

So far, everything supports the idea that the C: drive is simply hosed. I'm not sure what I would need to connect it to another machine. I have several other laptops and a desktop machine in the house, but really don't know squat about hardware.

 

I guess I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish. If the HDD is toast (and it sounds like it is), get another HDD, restore the system using the recovery disks and backup that you have, and move on.

The last thing in the world you want to fiddle with is a failing HDD. It will drive you insane failing and working and failing and working and failing and working until it finally just quits altogether.

 

You're probably right. I guess I was just trying to rule out some transitory problem before going to the hassle of finding an appropriate drive replacement (not as easy in Spain, where I live, than in other places), reinstalling a bunch of software and discovering what was wrong with my backup scheme.