[Zamion Alexandra]

Hello! I am currently writing you from a 10 year old gateway with a broken CD rom drive and a horrible penchant for whining. This is not, however, WHY I'm writing you...rather I'm using it because my real computer is down, and I need help.

I have an HP Pavillion a1110n, maybe 2 years old. Everything is factory standard, nothing has been changed. Yesterday while watching movies she shut down suddenly, and has refused to restart. I'm getting the error message:
Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for kernel.
Please contact your support person to report this problem.

I tried system recovery to no avail. I tried to recover from the recovery partition (Ha! Fat Chance...) and then tried from the discs. There are 11 Recovery CD's that came with my computer, and 1 supplemental recovery CD. I get all the way to disc 11, to around 86%, and I get a file copying error. The system reboots, and we're back to the DLL error.

I got in contact with HP, and they told me to try a "Destructive Recovery". I started that, and it got partially through before giving me this:

112047 MB done; 40580 MB left
Hard drive write error!
Press any key to continue.

Help? I'm not sure if there's something else I can try, or if this is a hardware problem, and something needs tweaked/screwed in/replaced/etc.

Any help is vastly appreciated!

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Possibly hard disk failure - especially if it's made by the old Maxtor company. Their disks were cheaper than WD's or Seagate's. Reason being they had inferior quality control and many more 'duds' with short lifespan compared to other brands. Even if yours is not a Maxtor, it may still have failed as even the more reliable brands had the odd bad ones that managed to slip through the net.

Edited by pip22, 28 November 2007 - 04:45 AM.

[pip22]

Possibly hard disk failure - especially if it's made by the old Maxtor company. Their disks were cheaper than WD's or Seagate's. Reason being they had inferior quality control and many more 'duds' with short lifespan compared to other brands. Even if yours is not a Maxtor, it may still have failed as even the more reliable brands had the odd bad ones that managed to slip through the net.

Edited by pip22, 28 November 2007 - 04:45 AM.

[Zamion Alexandra]

Thanks for the reply!

Is there a way to fix this, or do I need to replace the hard drive all together? If it does need replaced, is this something I can do myself?

[pip22]

To confirm whether the disk is physically damaged or near imminent failure you can run a diagnostic test on it which runs from a floppy disk irrespective of whether Windows is working or not. However, you need to know what make the disk is because the makers each have their own diagnostic utility which is not compatible with other makes.

The two most common brands of disk are Maxtor (now owned by Seagate), Seagate, and Western Digital. These are the links to the diagnostic utilities from each:

Maxtor/Seagate: http://www.seagate.c...loads/seatools/

Western Digital: http://support.wdc.c...?...=999&swid=2

If the diagnostic tool reports a failed or failing disk, it is not repairable and must be replaced. The replacement does not need to be the same make, just the same type (ie 3.5-inch ATA) and at least the same capacity or greater. It's a simple enough job. Unplug the PC, remove both sides of the case. remove the small screws which hold the existing disk in place. Remove the white power plug from the back of the drive, remove the grey ribbon cable from the back of the drive. Now remove the drive itself. Insert the new drive and connect both cables to it. Replace the small screws on each side of the disk bay. replace the sides of the case. The disk will need partitioning and formatting before you can install Windows on it, but Microsoft Windows XP setup CD can do this if you boot from it.

If you only have a recovery disk it may not be able to partition and format a new disk prior to recovery -- but try it anyway. If that doesn't work (and I suspect it won't) you'll have to use the disk preparation utility which some new hard disks are supplied with, or boot from a Windows 98SE startup disk (floppy) which will take you to a command-prompt. The floppy contains FDISK.EXE for partitioning, and FORMAT.COM for formatting that partition. They both run from the command prompt.

You can download a Windows 98SE floppy boot disk creator from here: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
(Select the link for "Windows 98SE OEM").

Tutorial with screen shots for using FDISK here: http://www.techrescu...es/prepdrvi.asp

Once the hard disk has a formatted partition on it, you can then run the Recovery CD to put Windows on it.

Edited by pip22, 28 November 2007 - 06:30 AM.