How do I stop Vista from chewing on my disks. I have had a failure of my C: hard disk and i want to stop Vista from chewing on my disk. Had to replace it and reinstall everything
View 9 RepliesI have just installed Vista Ultimate 64 Bit (on my 500 GB Seagate hard disk, the main hard disk). Then, I added 2 more hard disks (a 1 TB Hitachi and another 500 GB Seagate), so now I have 3 SATA hard disks installed. However, Vista cannot start. Sometimes, it stuck on the boot screen (the one with the scrolling green bar), sometimes it just show black blank screen. I then tried to disconnect, completely, the 2 hard disks I just installed. Vista can boot properly, I can access my data from both hard disks without problem.
When only the 1 TB Hitachi and the main hard disk are connected, Vista can boot properly and I can access my data from both hard disks without problem. When only the other 500 GB Seagate and the main hard disk are connected, Vista can boot properly, I can access my data from both hard disks without problem. However, if I connect the 3 hard disks at the same time, vista doesn't want to boot. I already installed the SATA controller driver from the CD that comes with the motherboard.
My system spec:
- Motherboard: Asus Striker Extreme
- Processor: Intel Core2Duo Dual Core 2.4 Ghz
- RAM: 4 GB (4x1 GB) DDR2
- Graphic Card: Nvidia 8800GTS, from ASUS
- 2 DVD Writers (LG and Sony), both IDE
- 1 Floppy Disk Drive
I've been running my Vista machine with a Seagate hard disk. Works fine in paralell. I tried to hook it up with Firewire on both ends and Vista never recognized the HD. Is there something I am doing wrong?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have 2 hard disk drives: Seagate 1000GB 7200.11 32MB Western Digital 150GB 10KRPM 16MB and two days ago, the Seagate hard drive isnt being recognized/seen by the computer. I have an Asus P5Q3 Deluxe mother board. A week before this problem I was getting alot of BSOD's and freezes, turned out to be faulty RAM, but added this in case it might help. I have never had this problem before... I unplugged and replugged the hard drive, and switched a cord that links it to the motherboard. I have also tried putting the cord into a different SATA port but it didnt work, I didnt try a diff power cord yet, but I will see if it works or not and post it PS - I'm not very computer technical or w/e, but
View 6 Replies View RelatedFor some reason, I cannot see a 1TB hard disk in Vista Explorer. There are no relevant messages in the event logs etc. I can save data to it (via apps, word, excel, downloads etc). I just cannot see it in windows when I go to my computer. Also, can't seem to find anything pertinent on the web, lost about a vista drive not being seen by windows 7 (vice versa), but not what I am looking for. My concern is that if Windows won't display the drive, it may be going bad and it's only 6 months old. Any pointer(s)
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a Toshiba laptop and it has come with a single 120Gb hard disk. However it is partitioned into a C drive and an E drive split 50:50. I don't really need to have two seperate areas in this way and would like to combine them together to have a single logical drive on the laptop. Can I do this from within Windows Vista that is installed on the laptop?
View 9 Replies View RelatedAm reinstalling Windows Vista after a virus infected my PC. I am reinstalling vista but after booting from DVD Vista does not recognise my SATA hard disk on the "Where do you want to install Windows?" screen. There are no issues with the hard disk and this happened once before but I can't remember how I solved this. My problem is the Vista installer not recognising my hard disk so I can install Vista. I have an Alienware pc with hitachi deskstar hard disk and asus a8n-sli deluxe motherboard.
I have to reinstall as a virus has caused my windows explorer to malfunction and it also installed a trojan which stole my key.I have tried a couple of ASUS raid drivers via a usb hard disk with no luck. We can't find any appropriate hitachi drivers.I think this is related to the hard disk controller?
I've recently been struck down with a trojan. I restored my computer to factory defaults, thinking this would do the trick. It did. However, I'm at Ohio State, and they're policy is that you have to totally reformat your hard drive before you'll be able to use the wireless internet. The problem is, i have an HP HDX16, and HP does not ship with Vista install disks, they have a hidden partition. I tried doing a system restore 3 times, and it didnt work. I backed dup the system defaults to an external hard drive,
My question is, how do i format my hard drive without the Vista Disks?
I'm using the Home Premium version of Vista and my disk defrag just keeps analyzing my disks and never defrags them. Its worked before but now this has started to happen.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have two, 1 is a dvd rom, the other is a cd rom, the dvd says that ANYthing that I put in must be formated (dvd, game, drivers... you name it), the cdrom says nothing when I put a disk in. what can I do to fix this?
View 6 Replies View RelatedI changed the Boot sequence to CD first, then HDD. Everything ran fine and vista seemingly loaded perfectly. After moving some files from my backup drive back onto my main one and installing some drivers, I was asked to restart my computer (for the drivers) so I did. Remembering that the boot sequence was still set on CD first, and since my driver CD was still in the drive, I decided to set the boot sequence back to the way I had it with XP: HDD and then CD. After doing this I quit BIOS and tried to boot, but I kept getting a message saying: DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
So I restarted the computer again, this time with my Vista CD in the drive, and again, the computer wouldn't boot and told me to enter a boot disk. Not knowing what to do, I went back into BIOS and changed the boot sequence back to CD first, then HD. After doing this, and restarting with the Vista CD in the drive, my computer booted up with no problems whatsoever. I tried reinstalling Vista (twice), reformatting the target hard drive, changing the boot sequence around, pretty much everything I could think of......
I have four (4) hard disks C: D: E: F: all are connected with sata cable and power cable.(of course) The F: is outside from the pc and connected via external SATA and power cable (like usb NOT usb) I know,with USB external hard disk i can use the safely remove option.
Is there any option to safely remove SATA hard disk without Shut Down the pc?
1) Start-Control Panel-Device Manager-Disk Drives-Right Click on hard disk-Properties-Policies-UntikDisable the Enable write cashing on the disk??
2) Start-Control Panel-Device Manager-Disk Drives-Right Click on hard disk-Disable??
1. I have a 120GB hard disk that shows a capacity of 105GB. No problems there--I understand that there's a restore partition and GB vs a billion bytes
2. My hard disk says that 54GB is being used.
3. However when I drag and select all folders in my C: and click properties, I only see 28GB of usage. This leaves an unaccounted-for 26GB.
I've just run disk cleanup and cleaned up my shadow copies before verifying all this. Besides at a MAXIMUM, system restore should only eat 15% of my hard disk (18GB). What explains this loss? How do I fight back and regain my hard-earned gigabytes?
I purchased a HP Media Center PC approx 16 months ago. Shortly after I purchased it I started getting what appeared to be an intermittent hard disk error - the screen would suddenly go black, system would attempt to reboot and I would get a message in the lines of "SMART FAILURE predicted... Windows detected a hard disk problem... Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." Then it gives some options to to go to the BIOS or to continue. Sometimes I can reboot immediately (usually reboots to safe mode first, then will reboot normal), other times I need to reattempt several times before it will actually reboot (the SMART FAILURE screen pops up each reattempt). Once I am able to reboot it's pretty unpredicatable when this screen will show up again...
sometimes a day or so later, other times it would be stable for a few weeks.... the reason I was able to 'test' for a while is 1.... after the problem occurs I backed up and removed all important data from the drive and 2... since the computer was
only a few months old HP was sending me a replacement warranty drive. Once I recieved the replacement drive I created an image of the original drive, copied it to the new drive and sent the 'faulty' drive back to HP. I assumed everything was fine, but the problem started occuring about 4 months later. So again, I made sure everything was backed up, created an image & contacted HP for another warranty drive. Once again, everything worked fine... for a while. Now, one year later out of the blue this 'hard drive failure is imminent' problem is popping up again...........
The other night I was in a rush and I held down the power button until it shut off. the next day I tryed turning it on and after the MB homepage came up for 3 secs on the top left hand corner of the screen it said "Disk boot failure, please insert boot disk and press enter" so i fooled around with the priority settings a little bit and nothing worked. I then inserted the windows vista CD and it would say "Loading windows files" then the loading bar came up and it would always freeze at the same point and after about a minute a blue screen came up saying a problem occured and is shutting off the computer to prevent further damage. Iv tryed everything. could my hard drive be damaged or something? Please someone help me. I cant work with much because i cant even get into windows! :-( All i can work with is the Setup menu
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have an hp desktop that came with vista home premium preinstalled. It will not boot up now. So I tried the emrgency recovery disks that I was told to createwhen I first got the computer and they didn't work. I thought I would have to boot from windows vista disks to repair this. No Vista disks came with the computer. My question is can I buy the upgrade SP1 disk to both improve the system and resolve the boot problem or am I forced to get the Full system
View 8 Replies View RelatedThe main hard drive on my pc that has the operating system on and everything is begining to fail and i need to sort it out before i cant use the disk anymore. The disk is in warrenty so i will be able to get it replaced but not all the things on it.
How can i backup my operating system and all of the programs and files on it, i have another hard drive that i can use as a backup but im not sure how to do it.
1. Put computer to sleep. (iffy - sometimes resets resolution, 1-2 times caused harmless BSOD)
2. On wake up, computer shows distorted image and then BSODs.
3. resets to bios, but doesn't complete the bios progressbar (not sure if this is for POST)
4. Hard Drive(s) start to click.
I may be wrong, but seems like a simple case of hard drive failure, but it was directly caused by Vista, which has been known to have problems with Sleep. I don't remember checking/signing any Vista-hardware liability waiver, so is Microsoft liable for the hard drive failure since the risk was not eliminated by a critical update?
I've never really had any problems with my computer acting up. I decided to add 2GB more RAM to my system this morning. Once I finally got them in there after much prodding and force I turned on my machine only to get this dreaded error message. I made sure the cords were still connected to the hard drive. I then took the RAM that I had just added back out but the error message still persists unfortunately. I'm wondering if anyone might have a suggestion as to other techniques I can try to get my system working again. I am currently running Vista Home Premium 32bit.
View 4 Replies View RelatedThe tech at HP told me that I need to use the exact same hard drive (Fujitsu 120G) that came with the notebook originally to use the recovery disks to reinstall Vista. Is that true? I wanted to use a Western Digital 160G HD instead.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI want to reinstall Vista using the provided recovery disks using my laptop, and then set up 7 as a dual boot. You know, have Vista for those games, and have 7 for everything else.
I have an Asus G51VX-RX05, which also is referred to as simply G51VX (Best Buy). Yes, I've heard it a million times, don't buy a computer at best buy. I know, I know. I won't do it again, I promise. So I want to use the provided recovery discs from my laptop to reinstall Vista. When I was installing 7 over Vista, I followed this: Clean Install Windows 7 - How to Perform a Clean Installation of Windows 7 - Part 1 of 3...........
I am trying to back up to a WD Passport 250gb usb drive. Every time it fails stating file 0x80070002 cant be found. I returned the drive to the store and replaced it, but I still get the same failure. Could I have gotten 2 bad drives or is there something I can do/chnge in Vista to correct this?
View 9 Replies View Relatedwent to get a new laptop and founds a nice mew Toshiba laptop (have to check model number) got the laptop home an started up fine worked fine also got thee system online and with all the anti virus set up (used the 90 day Norton trial) worked fine next day I stared the laptop up and the worked fine for a wile then went into a full crash with nothing responding forced a reboot look fine bios came up vista went to load the bar stuck and then restarted then kept doing this and no hard drive activity left the machine
and still stayed like this tried restore and start-up recovery as the pc was loading in safe mode the laptop did start the reload of the hard drive after that said was successful rebooted and did not want to load up ,took the pc back and checked the machine out they could not fix there machine the man told me the machine was not going to work and sated to fill out a Toshiba doa form stating that hard drive failure was the cause, that left me the option to change the laptop or get my money back and chose the get money back to see what i could get else were still looking I am thinking of getting a Sony vairo instead
I have built a new system to game with and have 2 new hard drives, on one I put XP Pro and then on the other I loaded Vista. I have more or less completed all the driver upgrades and windows updates but I keep getting repeated boot failures of Vista. I can always get into Safe mode but in Normal mode the boot fails just after the first spash screen at the point when the screen goes blank to be replaced by the small circular
Vista logo. After 2 or 3 attempts it succeeds to load but then the problem seems to reoccur, particularly when I have been back to XP for a while. I had a similar problem with XP but that seems to have sorted itself out. I have tired looking in the logs for faults and failures but no clues there.
Automatic backup worked fine until December 26 (daily). Since that date it has failed. T'he error code is as follows: Catastrophic Failure, 0x8000FFFF. Also, check disk will not work.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI run vista 32 bit. I'm pretty sure it's Vista personal (PC didn't actually come with a Vista disk). I only use it for music and games,basic stuff. It's a Compaq....It shat itself recently, it wouldn't boot, so i borrowed the Vista Business disk from my dad to repair it/disk boot, and it worked fine, that was a couple days ago. Today it happened again, except it won't repair the same way. I start it up, it goes to the Compaq startup screen with 4 options; [Esc] Boot menu, [F9] Diagnostics, [F10] Setup, [F11] System recovery. Except I can never go to the diagnostics or system recovery menus, i press the keys and nothing happens. Then when i don't press anything it goes to a black screen with "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter", so i do. Then it says "Windows is loading files" with a white bar below, once that's done it goes to the Microsoft Coporation green load bar that scrolls across over and over. Then it suddenly stops for a few minutes and a blue screen appears saying
"A problem has been detected and Windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps: Check to see if any new hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation ask your hardware or software manufacturer for any windows updates you might need. If problems continue disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to disable or remove coponents, restart your computer, press F8 to select advanced startup options, then select safe mode. (pressing F8 does nothing for me) TECHNICAL INFORMATION *** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x87995395) *** nvstor.sys - Adress 87995395 base at 87991000, Datestamp 46671a61".....
Think my HD may be failing. First, a few black screens have occurred on bootup. After normal shut down this A.M., it booted into the BIOS screen, after noisy boot. I simultaneously pressed Ctrl + Alt + Del expecting to get Task Manager. Got Advanced Options Menu. Pressed enter, booted to Windows normally. And just now, got louder than usual "whirring" noise on bootup, which went on to boot into Windows normally.
Question is: What would my options be if the Drive totally fails? I've got Personal Data saved. And all I have is Recovery Disks for this laptop. Would those be able to be installed on a new Drive if needed. I'm under the impression that I have a Smart Drive. Wouldn't that warn me if the Drive was failing? No warnings yet! And what type of Warning should I look for? So, how should I prepare for HD failure?
I tried to connect my computer to my HDTV and Vista decided it didn't want to load. It would get the to initial Microsoft Corporation load screen with the scrolling green bar and instantly lock up. Wen't back to my normal 19" monitor and had the same problem. It would boot into safe mode - after hanging on crcdisk.sys for an extended period of time (around 10 minutes). System restore didn't fix the problem. I started playing with components which turned out to be a frustrating game of trial and error. I narrowed the issue down to one of my hard drives (I have 4). When it is unplugged, everything is all good. When I connect it again, Vista locks up on boot. So does Vista point-blank refuse to start if there is a faulty drive in the mix? Keep in mind that all it had on it was movies and games, no crucial system files. And would anybody hazard a guess as to what has happened to the drive, and if it is recoverable. It's a Seagate 500GB.
View 4 Replies View RelatedThis is a tough one for me to explain but I will try very hard. I guess this started around late summer 09. I turned on my computer and it would run chkdsk over and over again. I let it go over night once and it was still scanning the hard drive over and over. Around Christmas time I reinstalled vista and still it would run chkdsk on every boot. Only this time, it ran once and then vista loaded fine. It would stop responding often and run slow but it was better. I manually turned off chkdsk but it made the computer run worse over time.
It would just not do anything so i would have to hold on the power button and turn it back on. The hard drive light will just stay on and the drive will sound a little different than usual. No clicking or metal on metal noise, just a different type of busy noise until you open something. Also you could use the disk clean up but not the defrag. It will say you should defrag volume so i would click defrag now. It would just show you the spinning blue circle and say analyzing but then say you should degrag volume again. So it won't defrag either. System restore also does not work.........
My Disk is split into 2 partitions, Vista (C: ) and Data (E, each is about 70 Gb. I do not use the Data partition. I want to delete it and allow Vista(C to use all 140 Gb. The Help pages suggest that if I delete (or reduce the size of) "Data", the free space becomes unallocated? Can I repartition the disk to allow Vista C: to acces all 140 Gb?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI need to replace my wife's motherboard, and I am trying to minimize the amount of change. She is currently running XP, but the hardware is old enough that I cannot simply swap the MBs, because a new board will need a different HAL. I was thinking about installing XP and migrating applications. I was wondering what would happen if I cloned her disk to a SATA disk and installed a Vista upgrade on top of the XP disk. I would run setup and provide the appropriate drivers at the F6 prompt. She has used Vista on occasion when we are out-of-town. I have a separate userID on my laptop that is configured to look as much as possible like XP. The question is whether a Vista upgrade would work on top of an XP image that used a lot of older hardware.
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