Tag Archives: log

hard drive problem or sumthing else?

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??

can i install linux on this computer?

ok. i burned an illegal copy of windows and installed it onto a computer. only until i could get a live cd of linux to install on it instead. well i got the live cd, and the computer will not let me log on until i activate windows. because the activation period is over. so i was wondering if since windows is still running but i just cant log in, can i boot up the computer and install linux on it and run that instead of windows? it is linux mint felicia. if this seems confusing at all just email me and i will try to explain it better.
well one other thing is this computer was brought back to me with windows missing the root file. so when i installed linux on it it wouldnt boot up witht he cd after install and it couldnt create the partition and had all these errors. would linux be the default os or not?