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A Hard Disc Error is Preventing Windows from Starting - update

tesuhoha
tesuhoha Posts: 17,971 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker Mortgage-free Glee!
edited 16 February 2015 am28 1:16AM in Techie Stuff
My daughter living in a different town has just texted me that her laptop is not working. She cannot get past the screen that says the above. She has tried system restore which hasn't worked and she cannot get into safe mode. She has gone out so I cannot get her to try things but on Googling this problem one of the solutions offered is to press F8 and select Startup Repair.

She has yet to try this but I wondered if there are any other suggestions. My husband reckons that she will need a new hard drive which is £50 but I think we should see if anything else works first.

She has a Lenovo G570 laptop and has Windows 7. This first occurred yesterday evening apparently and is still like it today. I told her to take the battery out to see if it changed anything but I have little hope that this will have fixed the problem when she gets back.
The forest would be very silent if no birds sang except for the birds that sang the best






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Comments

  • Fightsback
    Fightsback Posts: 2,504 Forumite
    edited 7 February 2015 pm28 2:42PM
    tesuhoha wrote: »
    My daughter living in a different town has just texted me that her laptop is not working. She cannot get past the screen that says the above. She has tried system restore which hasn't worked and she cannot get into safe mode. She has gone out so I cannot get her to try things but on Googling this problem one of the solutions offered is to press F8 and select Startup Repair.

    She has yet to try this but I wondered if there are any other suggestions. My husband reckons that she will need a new hard drive which is £50 but I think we should see if anything else works first.

    She has a Lenovo G570 laptop and has Windows 7. This first occurred yesterday evening apparently and is still like it today. I told her to take the battery out to see if it changed anything but I have little hope that this will have fixed the problem when she gets back.

    The battery has nothing to do with this. Looks like file system corruption, start up repair will not cure the problem but a repair install might. You need a windows 7 install disk to do this and it has to be the correct type - 32 or 64 bit.

    see here:

    sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html

    It could be very likely that the hard disk is on it's way out and it might be a good idea to replace it, spend a bit more on a SSD such as the excellent Crucial MX100 256gb (about £78) as these are much faster than traditional hard drives and don't suffer from potential physical shock damage.

    If you feel this is technically beyond those involved then take it to a reputable PC engineer who will sort the problem.

    Good luck
    Science isn't exact, it's only confidence within limits.
  • tesuhoha
    tesuhoha Posts: 17,971 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker Mortgage-free Glee!
    Its come up with error code 0x0 - Root cause - bad hard disc
    The forest would be very silent if no birds sang except for the birds that sang the best






  • Fightsback
    Fightsback Posts: 2,504 Forumite
    edited 7 February 2015 pm28 10:06PM
    tesuhoha wrote: »
    Its come up with error code 0x0 - Root cause - bad hard disc

    The drive may be salvageable and just have bad sectors however any drive that does get bad sectors I'd recommend trying to first salvage what data you can off it however this isn't always possible unless you have quite expensive equipment. Secondly, replace it as bad sectors are not a good omen for future reliability.

    Did the laptop come with a set of recovery disks, i.e the operating system or was it a recovery partition on the drive ? If it's the latter then you may have a problem if you did not make a set of recovery disks and the recovery partition is damaged or the drive unusable. You need a set of OS disks to reinstall the operating system.
    Science isn't exact, it's only confidence within limits.
  • I had a similar problem with a friends desktop, I downloaded Seagate SeaTools for DOS - www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/seatools/ burned it to a CD then booted from that CD and run a disk test. In my case it found a bad sector, I selected Fix option which it was able to repair and it then booted from the hard disk. This enabled me to copy data from the hard disk, however a few weeks later the disk died completely. There is a full PDF guide on the same web site mentioned above.

    It worked for me but there is no guarantee it will fix every hard disk problem, it works on Seagate and non-Seagate disks.
  • NiftyDigits
    NiftyDigits Posts: 10,459 Forumite
    Fightsback wrote: »
    The drive may be salvageable and just have bad sectors however any drive that does get bad sectors I'd recommend trying to first salvage what data you can off it however this isn't always possible unless you have quite expensive equipment. Secondly, replace it as bad sectors are not a good omen for future reliability.

    Did the laptop come with a set of recovery disks, i.e the operating system or was it a recovery partition on the drive ? If it's the latter then you may have a problem if you did not make a set of recovery disks and the recovery partition is damaged or the drive unusable. You need a set of OS disks to reinstall the operating system.

    Your whole post is overkill. Chkdsk, a Live CD or or one of the hard drive tools mentioned above will likely allow them to retrieve any important data.
    Replacing the HDD and reinstalling the OS is not a problem at all.
  • Fightsback
    Fightsback Posts: 2,504 Forumite
    edited 8 February 2015 am28 9:32AM
    Your whole post is overkill. Chkdsk, a Live CD or or one of the hard drive tools mentioned above will likely allow them to retrieve any important data.
    Replacing the HDD and reinstalling the OS is not a problem at all.

    Nifty, if they have no OS disks and the recovery partition is damaged - they have a problem. W7 signed digital cert is in the recovery partition and no W7 product key sticker IIRC for Lenovo.

    Once you start getting bad sectors you are very likely to start getting them again, change the HDD as soon as you can. Seen many a folk try fixing bad sectors then the HDD fall over again a few weeks later.

    Running CHKDSK could actually make matters worse on a disk that is failing and can actually finish it off or trash the file system further, you should put the drive into another machine and read off what data you can first if it is important data.
    Science isn't exact, it's only confidence within limits.
  • tesuhoha
    tesuhoha Posts: 17,971 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker Mortgage-free Glee!
    Thanks everyone. We have ordered a recovery disc from Amazon. Will let you know if it works.
    The forest would be very silent if no birds sang except for the birds that sang the best






  • Fightsback
    Fightsback Posts: 2,504 Forumite
    edited 8 February 2015 pm28 2:04PM
    tesuhoha wrote: »
    Thanks everyone. We have ordered a recovery disc from Amazon. Will let you know if it works.

    ?

    What exactly have you ordered, can you post a link ?

    This may not be what you require

    Look at this page for info:

    support.lenovo.com/gb/en/documents/ht035659
    Science isn't exact, it's only confidence within limits.
  • NiftyDigits
    NiftyDigits Posts: 10,459 Forumite
    tesuhoha wrote: »
    Thanks everyone. We have ordered a recovery disc from Amazon. Will let you know if it works.

    You didn't need to order a Recovery Disc.
  • NiftyDigits
    NiftyDigits Posts: 10,459 Forumite
    Fightsback wrote: »
    Nifty, if they have no OS disks and the recovery partition is damaged - they have a problem. W7 signed digital cert is in the recovery partition and no W7 product key sticker IIRC for Lenovo.

    Once you start getting bad sectors you are very likely to start getting them again, change the HDD as soon as you can. Seen many a folk try fixing bad sectors then the HDD fall over again a few weeks later.

    Running CHKDSK could actually make matters worse on a disk that is failing and can actually finish it off or trash the file system further, you should put the drive into another machine and read off what data you can first if it is important data.

    None of that presents a problem.

    Your advice is all over the place. First you suggest that their data won't be salvageable without expensive equipment and then you say that they can just put it in another machine.
    Why not suggest they put it in another machine or a caddy in the first place?
    As to the re-installation of the OS....it is no issue.
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