BleepingComputer.com: Can't boot or do a repair!

Well here is the scoop..... My daughter was using her computer and had her earphones in and went to wipe the screen and got a bit of a shock in her ear, used her computer the rest of the night and when she booted up the next day nothing happened. It goes through the bios screen and cd checks and than says press ctrl/alt/del to reboot.

I did a memtest for about 5 min with no errors (should I let it run longer), than I tried to use windows recovery and it hangs at the windows setup screen saying at the bottom ""examining19595 MB Disk 0 at ID 0 On bus 0 on atapi...


Any help would be appreciated.......

Memtest86 needs to run at least an hour, the longer it runs the more accurate the results will be.

You could have a problem with the hdd. Is the SMART feature enabled in the BIOS? If it isn't, enable it and see if it reports good or bad.

You can also find out the manufacturer of you hdd and go to their web site and download and run their diagnostic tool

Well last night I ran memtest for about 2 hours with no problems and I am running some tests with the HD utilities and it showed that SMART has been tripped prior to the test........

Is there anything I can do now or am I in need of a new HD.......

Here is another thing ....... sometimes when I boot the computer it will not even go into the boot sequence...... it won't boot from cd (is set to boot from cd first), and goes through the first boot check (for drives and memory) and than goes to a black screen with a cursor in the top left corner and I have to reboot to do anything ....... I am only getting the quick single beep at startup.....


I am also hearing a click in the HD when it is being accessed in the boot sequence......

This post has been edited by kwboom: 22 November 2008 - 09:46 AM

If the SMART is bad then you have an imminent failure of the hdd. The clicking noise is known as the click of death, it is classic. I would suggest backing up what ever files that you can to removable media like CDs, DVDs, flash drives, or another hdd before it dies. You can install it as a slave drive in another computer is it is connected by a IDE data cable. If you need help doing this just let me know. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.