Computer won't boot

[NichowA]

I accidentally shut down my computer by hitting the reset button instead of the power button and letting it go through its shutdown procedure. On my next boot, it came up and started checking my disk (NTFS) for errors and deleted something, it said, then a blue screen came up and said my boot sector was bad. I put in the XP Pro disk and tried to use the recovery console to fix the problem, but chkdsk /r didn't seem to repair anything. when i tried to use bootcfg, it couldn't find any installations of windows on my machine. I tried to use a ms-dos boot disk to run chkdsk /f but it didn't recognize my hard drive, i suppose either ebcause it is SATA or because it is NTFS. At any rate, I don't know what to do now unless I reinstall windows. Any suggestions?

 

[NichowA]

I decided to just reinstall windows, because i didn't mind if i lost some files. When I tried to, it said the disk partition was corrupted and could not be repaired, and windows needed to be isntalled on another partition. Well, that was the only partition on the disk, so I decided to just reformat it. When I tried, it deleted the partition, but when it went ot reformat it, it said:
"Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged.
"Make sure the drive is switched on and properly conencted to your computer. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated. Consult your computer manual or SCSI adapter documentation for more information.

"You must select a different partition for Windows XP
To contine, press ENTER."

I press enter, and I have:
C: Partition1 [New <Raw>] 70896 MB (70896 MB free)
Unpartitioned space 8 MB

Trying to format the raw partition does the same thing.
The hard drive (western digital Raptor 74GB) is no more than a month old. Everything ran flawlessly until I accidentally hit restart instead of the power button. For this to have damaged the hard disk beyond repair seems ridiculous to me. However, at this point I see no other option than to RMA the HDD itself. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Ryoga]

Download and run the WD Data Lifeguard Tools. Run the diagnostic on your drive, and if everything comes out ok, have the utility zero-fill the drive.

 

[NichowA]

I downloaded the diagnostic and moade a bottable floppy. Put it in, turned on the machine, it started to load up and showed copyright info on the screen, then said "Critical Error: Aort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" I had it retry a couple times, then let it fail, and it said "CauseWay error 11: DOS reported an error or corrupt file found." after which it shows the A:\> command prompt. I tried running the dlgdiag5.exe file from the disk at the command prompt then, but it just did the same thing.

Edit: I formatted the disk again, and it ran. I ran the diagnotic, and it said it didn't find any problems. I told it to zero-fill the drive, and it comes up and says are you sure and I said yes and then it said that there was a cable error. So I open up the case to verify that everything is connected properly, which it is. I turn the PS back on and turn the machine back on, and now the display won't even initialize.... grr. I'm going to go to bed and mess with it again tomorrow perhaps.

Edit2: just as I went to put the cover back on, a screw fell to the bottom of the case. I wasn't sure what it came from, but I noticed that when I put my hand on the VC heatsink (I have a zalman heatpipe on it) it wobbled. I took the VC out and saw that a screw was missing from the heatsink and that it wasn't making very good contact with the GPU. I put the screw back on, drew a deep breath and sighed when the display initialized. A fried graphics card was the last thing I needed.
Anyway, It seems like maybe things have been jostled around too much. I think that tomorrow I will take out all the cables, check to make sure that all of the hardware is mounted correctly and then put the cables back. I'll run the diagnotic again, and hopefully everything will work. If not... well.... bah.

Edit3: I kept getting that cable error, so I fiddled around with things. I tried using a different SATA cable, changing the SATA slot that I was plugged into, tried alternating between molex and SATA power conenctors, and nothing worked. I decided maybe I should try the other SATA controller on my board, even though it is primarily intended for RAID configuratins. I enabled the Promise SATA controller and set it to run in IDE mode, then ran diagnostics again. The check ran just fine, and now it's writing zeros to the drive. Hopefully I will be back up and running shortly. Thanks for the tip about the WD Data Lifeguard Tools. I didn't know about them, as this is my first WD drive.