Right my youngest sister turned my other sisters computer on and off loads of times. i turned it on and it just started loading windows then restarted. so i put the recovery discs in and then an error came up half way through saying i need to check the hdd for viruses/errors. i got my mate to make me a windows startup disk on floppy but this wont work so what can i do?

Need urgent help as my sister needs to do her coursework on it


Cheers

what version off windows is it

XP Home

Sorry to be impatient but any ideas or am i just best ordering a new hard drive? would i still be able to use the recovery discs that i got with the computer? or will they now be useless?

hmm, have you tried using chkdsk at a prompt or formatting the disk (if you can get to one - which you should be able to)

chkdsk /F fixes errors on the disk which is slightly more likely than a virus if it happened after your younger sisters attempt at checking for button durability.

If you do get a new drive your recovery disks should still work but I wouldn't want to say the drive is shot just yet.

I cannot as far as i know get into the hard drive though to do a scan disk. could i put the hdd into another computer and then check it for errors? then fix the errors use the recovery disks

You wont be able to put that hard drive in a different pc, either you will get a blue screen or it wont boot, XP sees the different hardware and it wont work. Your hard drive probably isnt shot, if the drive needs to be checked for errors, XP should have asked if when you turned on the pc. Boot the pc with the XP disk in the machine and run the repair.

yeah i am getting the blue screen. i have tried with the boot disk but it just tries to read it then stops (tried three different ones actually) i dont have an XP Disk only the recovery disks that came with the pc.

Check the recovery disks, one of them should contain the operatoring system. I never heard of xp floppies.

Right sorted now, thanks alot for the help