liquid_rockface
03-07-2007, 17:52
Hi guys, I need some help for a friend of mine:
His hard drive seems to have crashed, but I want to be sure that that is the problem.
On startup the computer says "Primary hard disk fail" then offers that you press F1 to continue. Then after that it says "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter".
However the computer sees that there is a hard drive there, and if I put the Windows CD in, it sees the hard drive ok and I even successfully did a "chkdsk" on it (didn't show any errors) from the recovery console and I managed to delete a partition and format it and attempt to install windows on it (however this ended up going round in a loop and somehow the partition I deleted came back again, with all the data on it!)
So clearly there IS still readable data on the hard drive, but the computer sees some failure.
My question is: Is this definitely a hard drive failure? Is there no way it's a motherboard failure or something? How can one tell if the motherboard has failed? The computer is 3 or 4 years old, 2.6GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading.
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
His hard drive seems to have crashed, but I want to be sure that that is the problem.
On startup the computer says "Primary hard disk fail" then offers that you press F1 to continue. Then after that it says "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter".
However the computer sees that there is a hard drive there, and if I put the Windows CD in, it sees the hard drive ok and I even successfully did a "chkdsk" on it (didn't show any errors) from the recovery console and I managed to delete a partition and format it and attempt to install windows on it (however this ended up going round in a loop and somehow the partition I deleted came back again, with all the data on it!)
So clearly there IS still readable data on the hard drive, but the computer sees some failure.
My question is: Is this definitely a hard drive failure? Is there no way it's a motherboard failure or something? How can one tell if the motherboard has failed? The computer is 3 or 4 years old, 2.6GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading.
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!