Won't boot and no hard drive detected in system recovery

[kwond]

I've had my PC for about a year, its a self build, it ran without any problems until a couple of weeks ago where it started slowing down like crazy. Unfortunately I was at Uni at the time and my brother didn't tell me about the issues. It would basically work normally (but a little slow) and then freeze up every few seconds. One time it failed to start - I think the error message was that the boot files were corrupt or something, but this was a one off.

After about 3 weeks of slow behaviour it started doing the following:

I turn it on and it tries to start up. The green microsoft vista progess bar comes up for a for a few seconds, then a blue screen of death flashes up (too quick to read anything on it) and the PC restarts.
If i try to boot into safemode it freezes while it lists the drivers
its loading. The last driver displayed is consistently crcdisk.sys. (I have tried all the safe modes and last good config to no avail).

So, I put in the recovery disk, choose the language and click on Repair
Windows.
The next dialog box is called System Recovery Options. The problem I
get here is that there are no operating systems in the list. It says i
should look for hard drive drivers, but I don't know how to find them. My drive is a 1tb seagate barracuda

Wierdly when I choose the install option as if i was going to do a complete re-install it did come up with a 1tb drive on the options and the drive did pass the short seatools test. When I tried the long seatools test the program froze before the test even started.

The hard drive has a lot of photos and work which I don't want to lose so I am reluctant to do a complete re-install.


Please help! =(

Mukund

[Shenan Stanley]

First, let's address this:
"The hard drive has a lot of photos and work which I don't want to
lose so I am reluctant to do a complete re-install."

Are they really that important? They were not important enough (obviously)
for you to figure out some way to have more than one copy of them -
backups - before the issue; so how important are they really - or is this a
case of, "Didn't know the importance/value until it was too late (almost)"?

Backups - you hear people harp on this topic all the time - unlikely this is
the first time you have heard it (or may have even told others about it
yourself) - but it's so easy to ignore until you realize it's too late.
External USB hard drive and a batch script - or something like a Seagate
Replica that just does it for you? <$100 U.S. long ago would have eased
your worries right now, eh?


Anyway...

Sounds like the hard disk drive could be dying. Use something like a BartPE
or Ultimate Windows Boot CD to boot up, access the files and copy off what
you need to some external media before you do anything else. In other
words - backup your stuff.

Then get the hard disk drive manufacturer's diagnostics utility (probably
have to make a bootable CD out of it) and use it to determine if the drive
needs help.

You probably should figure that much out before you continue on.

[Gene E. Bloch]

That's *always* the last thing shown. Then the both process goes silent for
a while - which is totally normal - until the GUI starts. Unfortunately the
trouble spot is therefore not at all clear, since it is happening during
the silent period...

You could try to make a backup boot CD (such as EASEUS Disk Copy), but
*please* do it on a separate computer so that *nothing* is happening to or
on your original hard drive. Then boot from that CD and copy your entire
hard drive to an external USB drive of sufficient capacity.

This will help to cover your butt (OK, preserve your data) while you try to
solve (or get help solving) the problem.

I suspect your hard drive is failing, but it could be as simple as a system
file that got corrupted. I can't offer any help there, sorry.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

[Gene E. Bloch]

the *boot* process, of course.

I do know better than to trust the spell checker, but I can be careless :-)