my mothers computer wont boot it will get as far as the log in screen if you wait 10 mins. the hard drive labors and the read write arm clicks back and forth. i know this is a sign of a bad hard drive however i had another drive do this in my hp and it was just a messed up bootloader. im asking becouse i decided to just go ahead run hdat2 to fix possible bad sectors and then reformat. it will run the bootable cd but after scanning the hardware when i should have disk options on the screen i get nuthing. i dont get no drive found or anyof than just a blank screen with a curser. im thinking i have a busted hard drive. i just find it odd that i cant even get drive options to run off the bootable cd. could a bad hard drive prevent this from running? i did try a linux live cd on the machine and it ran fine. im pretty sure its the hard drive i just wanna be sure before i go spend money i dont have. if not the hard drive what else could i check? or dose this sound like classic hard drive failure??
But the linux distribution you used; was it a live cd or did you actually install linux? It sounds like you have damaged files on the drive. Sometimes its normal to hear hard drive noise, not a lot of noise but some is understandable. I’ve had countless Hewlett Packard machines, some of them the hard drive was mounted vertically they usually don’t last very long.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
Hirens boot cd is the best for diagnostics.
computer techy
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