PC Boots to Scandisk then Halts!!!!

[MrT]

Here's the problem. It's on an AcerOpen 200 MHz Pentium. Win 98.
The thing starts up and goes directly towards scandisk. Scandisk pop's up and says it has encountered an error while reading the hard drive. It will now attempt to fix the error. Then starts running, stops at 11% and sits there 4-ever doing nothing. Shut it down , restart the same thing ..over and over and over...well you get my drift. Any suggestions???
Thanks

[BBA]

Format the drive, if that dont work, fdisk the drive then format and if THAT don't work, Low Level Format the drive!

If none of the above work, something else is wrong! (like overclocking or wrong settings or something...)

BBA

[Susan]

I agree with BBA, but for curiosity...Can you bypass the scandisk and see if it goes into WIN?

[MrT]

System is normal..no overclocking..just plain old pc...Susan<<<Was looking for that option...how to by-pass the Scandisk????
The computer is owned by a insurance company...erasing it would really suck!!!! Alot of un-backed up info on that thing. would really like to get into windows to copy all the info to a new hard drive.

[smartxtai]

can't you just exit the scandisk by pressing the "X" button? And if you ever buy another computer, make sure its not acer. they give so many people problems. I know, a lot of my friends fell for there cheap prices and also cheap products.

[Susan]

I don't know about Acer's, but how about just hitting the escape or enter key?

Or just booting to a floppy and reinstalling WIN? You'll also get to see whether the files are still intact.

[MrT]

Will try..
Thanks!!!!!!!

[philipg]

My friends computer did the same thing. we underclocked it until it booted. His won't boot until it was set at 90 from 166. He replaced the CPU with another one and it runs better than it ever did before.

Your CPU may be bad.

[MrT]

Got it past Scandisk and into windows. Found out scandisk said the hard drive is severely damaged. So I am going to replace the hard drive. But(key word) I have to copy everything from the old hard drive to the new hard drive exactly like it is. They need everything on the old hard drive. So, if you guys could help me out HOW DO I DO THIS.
NEED A STEP BY STEP SUMMERY IF POSSIBLE ON COPYING ALL DATA EXACTLY FROM ONE TO ANOTHER.
THANKS

[Susan]

There's a few programs out there to get the job done.

The one I prefer is Diskclone, but there's also DriveCopy, and Ghost.

You can get a trial of Ghost here:

www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/fs_ghost.html (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/fs_ghost.html)

[toms111]

The problem is that if scandisk says the drive is severly damaged, it may be more than a hardware problem. Although hardware may be an issue, you most likly aso have a very corrupted disk that will stll be corrupted if you duplicate it to another partition, assuiming that this is even possible. I say this because the disk copy programs that I am familiar with most often run diagnostics on the partition you are copying and stop if the partition is bad.
Recomendation:
1) Try latest version of Norton disk doctor from a boot disk. I can't guarantee it will fix everything but it has done some very impressive things for me. It may not fix everthing but it should recover what can be recovered. Assuming it doesn't fix everthing,
2) Install a new 1st drive and make current drive a slave. Do a clean install of the OS on the new drive.
3) Then attempt to copy the needed files from the old drive to the new drive.
Good luck
PS: Norton Disk Doctor is one of the utilities that comes on bootable floppy disks ("Emergency Disks")with Norton System Works.

[MrT]

Thanks for all the info. Finally got it fixed. I ended up using Ghost, and copied all the info from the old hard drive to the new one. So far , so good. Thanks again Everyone.