Hard drive / partition woes...

[NightshadowUK]

Hey folks. My parents' computer decided to throw a complete wobbler this morning and from what I can gather the partition on the hard drive is corrupt in some way.

When trying to run safe mode / Windows whilst in their system, it blue-screens and restarts. I tried to run a Windows repair install but after booting from the CD it's not actually an option - most likely because it detects the partition as [Unknown].

So in the name of backing up their files I put the drive into my external closure, only to find it doesn't detect and more often than not crashes my system in trying to do so.

Does anyone have any ideas cos I'm drawing a blank here?

[invalidpagefaul]

Have you run the makers diag software to rule out a faulty drive?

[NightshadowUK]

Sorted.

I plugged it internally into my system, and upon boot Windows automatically ran CHKDSK fixing a whole host of corruptions. Then finding that it was detected a normal, readable drive, I hooked it back into the oldies system and it's working like nothing was ever wrong.

I suppose the real mystery is what the caused this to happen in the first place...

[peterb]

Memory problems corrupting the hard drive during page writes? Might be worthy running memtest 86+ on the original machine.

[NightshadowUK]

Well I ran MemTest 86+ from the BIOS (thank-you DFI) for 5 hours with no errors, I know I could run it for longer but it'd seem there's no immediate problem. How very strange...

[peterb]

Very odd - just 'one of those things' - but worrying that nothing definite was found - glad its all working now though!

[boxnet]

Is your drive making any strange noises - mine did for a while and also did the above before dying!