My laptop had recently displayed "A disk read error has occured" message upon startup (after the first screen when turned on). I then proceeded to delete the existing partition and then did a fresh reinstall of Windows XP from the reinstallation CD.
Everything seemed to work fine at that point, after a fresh version of Windows was installed. I reinstalled all the Dell drivers that came with my laptop. However, when I tried to do a Windows update for SP3, I received a blue screen of death upon the installation of SP3 - error code was 0x0000007A. I restarted the computer and then it gave me another blue screen with the message UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, 0x000000ED.
So after that, I deleted the partition again and reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows again. This time, I did not install the drivers. I first went on the Internet to do a Windows update, NOT SP3 this time - I just downloaded the 102 critical updates that were found. Upon downloading those updates, I got this "Delayed Write Fail" popup error message:
Delayed Write Fail:
Windows was unable to save all the data for the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS. The data has been lost. This may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection.
The delayed write fail C:\ location changed for each download. Also, I already tried doing a chkdsk /r with the XP CD and it didn't help.
Does the problem lie within the hard drive and perhaps permenant bad sectors? Can this hard drive still be saved, or is the only solution to buy a new hard drive?
Thanks in advance!