WinXP frozen at boot screen

[jjones]

Running XP Pro SP2. This morning I went to the office and started up my computer, which then promptly got stuck at the boot screen. Fortunately, I had a BartPE disk handy and through that was able to fix the problem by using diskcheck and defragmenting. I think the real problem was fixed by the diskcheck though, because it reported some file system errors.

Anyway, I was wondering if this is a sign of the HDD on it's way out? Never had this happen before (I've had HDDs go to the crapper though) and any insight others have had with this problem would be helpful.

The last time the computer was used before this was just briefly, no problems at the time, and it shut down just fine. I could understand that if it had crashed, that might have led to something like this, but this just seemed out of the blue.

Also, my BartPE had a terrible defrag utility on it. I spent a lot of time putting that together and I don't feel like doing it all over again. Any suggestions for a boot disk like BartPE that's all prepackaged already with some decent utilities on it?

Arghh, just realized this probably belongs in the OS forum, so mods, feel free to move it if you're inclined to.

 

[vacuuum]

try Hiren's boot cd.
This bootable cd has pretty good apps in it.
As for your hard drive... it might be on it's way out.
Some disc errors can also be triggered by power outages.
But if you said you shut down the last time, then your HDD might be going bad.

 

[mikeyes]

The question is whether there were file system errors or bad sectors on your hard drive. If it was only file system errors then your hard drive is probably fine and there was just corruption within the OS. If there were bad sectors on the disk then its a crap shoot. I have seen hard drives live with bad sectors for years and not have further trouble but I have also seen bad sectors spread on a drive and ruin more data. As cheap as hard drives are today I would probably replace it if you found bad sectors during the diskcheck.

Another way to check the drive is to check the S.M.A.R.T information on the drive. You can use a software program called Speedfan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php) to access and read the S.M.A.R.T info from the drive. Its not foolproof but a good general indicator of the drive's health.

 

[jjones]

Well, there weren't any bad sectors, as I thought might first be the case, just file system errors. It's bizarre to me that this popped up out of the blue without anything being out of the ordinary during the previous use of the pc. I'm just going to replace the drive with a new one anyway as HDDs are so cheap, and then use the existing one as storage - not backup though, maybe for music as I still have lots of CDs I haven't ripped to mp3 yet.