When booting PC I am getting warning of an imminent disc failure warning on XP Boot. It says that I should backup disc etc. and stops saying press F1 to continue.

Pressing F1 does not boot XP but goes round and does above again. Will not even boot into Safe Mode.

If I use the XP System CD-ROM Disc and boot into Recovery Mode can I try to FIXBOOT before rebuilding XP and/or even replacing the disc?

If the above does not work how safe is doing a FIXMBR before a full rebuild?

I am going away for 7 weeks in just over a week and need to fix this before going away or my wife will not have a PC and I wont be able to Skype etc. I am pushed for time and a full rebuild is not something I want to have to undertake now.

Thanks in advance for any help. I have done a search on the forum but surprisingly it did not return any results.

Regards.

If you can get into the recovery console, then I recommend you run chkdsk /r on the disk first to check for any errors. Note this can take many hours even more than a day to complete on larger drives and may appear to have stalled, but just let it finish. If that does not work, you can try Fixboot but in any case, I would pull that drive and install it as a secondary drive in another computer to copy off any data you don't want to lose. For that matter, you can run chkdsk /r on it while it is installed in the second computer too.

Thanks for the reply.
I have hit a snag. My PC will not boot off CD-ROM. BIOS is set to boot off CD-ROM and even have disabled hard drives but when going through boot sequence it still comes up with error message.
Have got it to try to boot off CD but fails. CD is OK in my laptop. I have had problems for some time getting my CD-ROM drive to recognise ordinary music CDs.
I think I may need a new CD-ROM - if I install one will basic boot-up pick it up using default drivers?
Thanks

Note when you have it set to boot to the CD, you still must press a key to make it do so. It will not automatically boot to the CD. During the boot process, watch the lower left corner of your screen and you should see a prompt to press a key to boot to CD. If you don't press a key (even with CD listed first) it will time-out and move on to the next device.

I know what the prompt is as I got to his with the "failing" CD on my laptop. It would not recognise the CD as a bootable CD on my failing PC. I have in fact disabled all other drives in the BIOS other than the CD-ROM drive, so it cannot move on to another device. As I said, in my earlier reply In think that the CD-ROM drive is playing up. I wonder that if I put a new CD-ROM drive in whether this would work if it is a fault on the controller.
Regards

As I said, in my earlier reply In think that the CD-ROM drive is playing up. I wonder that if I put a new CD-ROM drive in whether this would work if it is a fault on the controller.

It could be the drive, or the disk or the controller (which is on the motherboard). When you are in the BIOS Setup Menu, can you see the CD Drive listed? If the disk itself is bad, then it might be be seen as bootable. You could try the disk in another machine for a test, just be sure to cancel before it tries to install.

In the BIOS setup menu I can see the CD-ROM drive listed. The PC will not recognise the CD in the drive as a bootable CD. The boot process says that there is no bootable disc loaded. I have tried the disc in another machine and it boots OK. I have tried another XP Recovery CD-ROM in my "failing" PC with the same result. So my dilemma is the same; will a new CD-ROM drive solve this initial problem of trying to run CHKDISC on my failing hard drive? If not, and it is the controller (which you says is on the motherboard) I will have to replace this (which for me will be a new PC in view of its age) as I will not be able to rebuild XP if I need a new hard drive in the end.
Any further advise or comments please?
Regards

Further to the above reply post.
I have done some more research/tests and conclude that my CD-ROM works OK.

I have a bootable LINUX (Knoppix V 5.1) CD-ROM that I used about 4 years ago to recover files from a similar situation from my laptop hard drive to a USB hard drive prior to replacing the failed hard disc.

I found this disc and put it in my PC and, hey-presto, Knoppix LINUX booted OK.
I have a 1TB external USB drive on my PC and was able to copy all files that have changed since the last weekly backup so now have a full backup set of files. Pressure off!!!

However, why will my PC not boot from any of my two available XP Recovery CDs?

After I go through the boot process with XP recovery CD it says "Disc boot failure, insert system disc and press enter". If I insert either of the XP discs I get that message back but the system boots with the LINUX disc. Why?

Could any of BIOS settings be wrong?
In the BIOS under the "MAIN" tab the CD-ROM is shown as:-
SEC MASTER [HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4120B]
TYPE [AUTO]
PIO MODE [4]
ULTRA DMA MODE [DISABLED]

The options for the above are:-
TYPE [None, AUTO, User Type HDD, CR-ROM, LS-120, ZIP, MO or Other ATAPI Device]
PIO MODE [0, 1, 2, 3 or 4]
ULTRA DMA MODE [0,1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or Disabled]

Any ideas?

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards

If the Linux disk boots fine, your BIOS settings are good.

Are these XP disks factory made? Factory made disks are made on professional pressing machines that tend to have very accurate alignments. Home burners may not be perfectly aligned and when trying to read on another reader which also may not be perfectly aligned, the tolerance variances of the two drives may add up to something totally out of tolerance.

So, if me, I would swap drives and see what happens.

In any event, I am glad you were able to copy off your data files.


If not, then that suggest an alignment issue with the burner, or the reader. In fact, it could still be an alignment issue with the reader even if factory made but

Thank you for your last reply. Yes, both the Recovery CD-ROMs were Factory made but the Linux CD was burned by me on my laptop. That gave me a clue so I copied my Recovery CD-ROM on to a new CD on my laptop and this worked. So now I can boot my PC with the Recovery CD-ROM.
Managed to do a CHKDISC and it said that there were no errors but it suggested I run it again with /p switch. This ran OK but it said that errors were corrected.

Now the situation is that I booted my PC into XP but the disc light was on almost continually. The PC was so slow I eventually shut down and rebooted. However, it fails to boot and it says that \windows\system32\config\system is missing or corrupt and that to correct this boot from CD-ROM, select "R" from first prompt. I did this but system went into a Blue Screen of Death saying "REGISTRY_ERROR".

Tried booting XP normally and tried both SAFE MODE and LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION without success.

I ave googled the problem and find some possibly conflicting recovery options most using DOS commands but not sure how I can do this unless I can find a floppy disc with bootable DOS on it. Alternatively, I could use my LINUX boot disc and try to remember my UNIX commands, not used for the last 10-12 years.

Have you any ideas of best way forward.

Many thanks & regards.