Please Help "Data error reading drive C"

[jose]

My friend has a p3-933 w/ win98se. She is getting the following error on boot up:

Data error reading drive C, The system hangs and wont go any further.

The system is an Inter 810 intergrated mobo. It was fine until she installed some
software "Pixela" that came w/ a sony dig. camera w/ a usb interface. After she rebooted
all she gets is the same error message.

We were able to use the win98se boot floppy and boot up and also look at drive C (dir).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Jose

 

[sohcrates]

can you hit F8 and get into safe mode?

if so, you might be able to install software from there

 

[JohnnyPC]

The hard drive has gone/is going bad. The software install was purely coincidental. This error is generated when the disk just can't physically pick up the data off the drive because of bad sectors etc. It might appear that you can read the disk from DOS but if you read it ALL then eventually you would also get to the bad part that can't be read. My suggestion would be to either retreive important info while in DOS or slave it into another system and backup anything that way...then head over to the Hot Deals forum and see where you can get a dealon a new dirve...

 

[jose]

Thanks for the help .

Sohcrates:

We tried "F8" going into safe mode, but get the folling "While initilizing device VKD: Windows protect"

then it hangs.

JohnnyPC: I'll do that last, then try a reinstall. This is a relative 3 month old Seagate HD.


Again thanks for the help.
Jose

 

[JohnnyPC]

Maybe before you try your re-install boot off the win98 boot disk again and try a scandisk C: /surface - This will do a surface scan of the hard drive and I would bet the farm that it will come back with at least a few of those dreaded red X's...if it even get's that far. Good thing about this is that because it's only 3 months old, you can RMA it to Seagate no problem...seems like hard drives either break right a way or last forever...

 

[jose]

JohnnyPC: Thanks, I'll try that.

Regards,
Jose