Netbook hard drive crashed

[zxcvbob]

I started it up last night, and CHKDSK ran automatically.  Detected hundreds of errors.    Then Windows 7 System Recovery (I think that's what they called it) ran all night long and gave up; said the system could not be recovered.  I had a backup (from last July) on an external hard drive and wondered how I was going to restore it.  Rebooted, went into the System Recovery mode and found the restore from backup button.  Restored the backup image and it seems to be running OK.  All my data on the second partition is still there, although there's nothing important on the netbook anyway.  So I dodged a bullet, this time.  I'm gong to run CHKDSK /R on it when I get home to scan the entire disk surface for errors.

Does this mean I need to replace the drive? (they are not expensive) And if I replace it, how do I bootstrap this thing up far enough to restore the backup again?  I don't think it came with a recovery CD, but I can check and see.  It doesn't have an optical drive or a floppy, but I have external drives I can use if necessary.

I wonder if I can make that big external HDD bootable?

[Brad Johnson]

Tell us what chkdsk finds when you run the new scan.  If you get a bunch more errors then you have a hard drive crash and it will need to be replaced.  If not, you have have gotten some kind of nastiness that corrupted your system but is gone now that you restored.

And, as always, back up often...

Brad

[lee n. field]

I started it up last night, and CHKDSK ran automatically.  Detected hundreds of errors.    Then Windows 7 System Recovery (I think that's what they called it) ran all night long and gave up; said the system could not be recovered.  I had a backup (from last July) on an external hard drive and wondered how I was going to restore it.  Rebooted, went into the System Recovery mode and found the restore from backup button.  Restored the backup image and it seems to be running OK.  All my data on the second partition is still there, although there's nothing important on the netbook anyway.  So I dodged a bullet, this time.  I'm gong to run CHKDSK /R on it when I get home to scan the entire disk surface for errors.

Does this mean I need to replace the drive? (they are not expensive) And if I replace it, how do I bootstrap this thing up far enough to restore the backup again?  I don't think it came with a recovery CD, but I can check and see.  It doesn't have an optical drive or a floppy, but I have external drives I can use if necessary.

I wonder if I can make that big external HDD bootable?

If it's like my netbook, it came with a utility to make recovery DVDs.  Which assumes you have a USB DVD burner.

Check your Windows system event log for disk errors.  If they show up there, replace the disk ASAP.

Press f8 on startup, select system repair.  Select command prompt once that comes up.  Run "chkdsk /?" from the command line.  That will tell you what command line option to use to check for bad sectors.  Do that.  If it finds anything, look to replace the disk.

[zxcvbob]

Tell us what chkdsk finds when you run the new scan.  If you get a bunch more errors then you have a hard drive crash and it will need to be replaced.  If not, you have have gotten some kind of nastiness that corrupted your system but is gone now that you restored.

And, as always, back up often...

CHKDSK is not quite finished scanning the free space on the disk, but I *think* everything else looks good. 

On the File Verification step it says:
   103 large file record processed
   0 bad file records processed
   0 EA records processed
   41 reparse records processed.

I don't know what a "reparse record" is.  All the rest of the scans (journaling, indexes, security, etc) look good.  No errors.

The free space scan just finished and it didn't find anything either.  CHKDSK put up a summary, but it didn't stay up long enough for me to read it before it rebooted.  Wait a minute, it just popped up another message, said the file system is clean.  Now Windows is starting.

[lee n. field]

Go download the Ultimate Boot CD iso.

Download the most recent stable unetbootin for Windows. 

Use unetbootin and the Ultimate Boot CD iso to make a bootable memory stick. 

Boot the UBCD, pick Hard Disk from the main menu, and diagnosis from the next menu.  Pick the appropriate manufacturer's diagnostic, or Seagate Seatools from the diagnostics menu.  Run the diagnostic.  This will check the disk hardware.

I don't like the fact that you had a long chkdsk, and had to recover from a backup.