Vista locks up, won't boot correctly

Hi. I've had almost nothing but problems with this computer since I bought it two years ago, but things have really gotten bad lately.

Until recently, it would occasionally lock up, nothing would happen, but after about 60 seconds, it would unlock and go about its business.

Now it locks and won't unlock. Everything freezes. Then I get the blue screen of death telling me about a kernel error. Then it reboots.

And EVERY time I turn it on now, I get "diskette drive 0 seek failure" and I have to hit F1 to boot, then it gives me the options to start Windows in safe mode or normally. I start it normally at that point and it seems to go fine....until the next time it freezes up, which happens, easily, four times a day just to me and at least a couple times a session to others in my household who use it.



It's Windows Vista Home Premium (it says), bought it in November 2007. Running on a Dell.

My e-z bake solution would be to get the important stuff I need off the hard drive and onto an external, then reformat and re-install the OS. Would that be a fix?

Anybody else ever see this problem before? This has never been a good computer/OS but it's gotten much worse lately.

Thanks.

Yours is a good idea but I would go one better
Go to the support site of the hard drive manufacturer and download their diagnostic utility and see what shows up

Okay, dumb question...how can I tell who the hard drive manufacturer is? Is it written on the housing (sorry, would just like to avoid dismantling things and wires and opening the case if there's an easier way)?

When you first boot up and the computer is loading, it will tell you it detects the hard drive and will list it
For example WD - XXX is Western Digital

Nope, doesn't do that. Tells me the processor. Nothing about the hard drive.

But just, in general terms, what causes these problems? Is it viral? Is it a hard drive defect? Is it that Vista is just terrible and when combined with a Dell is unworkable?

I just don't understand why this thing has become sooooooooo slow lately, why every other program is (not responding) and why it constantly locks up. I'm sick of seeing the little Vista circle go round and round until it stops and locks up and I have to shut things off.

diskette drive 0 seek failure
Would be the clue that it's a hard drive problem
Try running chkdsk /r and chkdsk /f
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67612-ch...isk-chkdsk.html

Did the first (easiest, seemingly) method. It booted, said it was checking the disk, and two seconds later said it couldn't open the volume, Windows is done checking the disk, .....

The others look complicated. I'll get to them eventually. But this sucks.

Second method: no dice, either. Ran chkdsk c:/f from an elevated command prompt, and it said it would check the disk at restart, so I restarted, and, nope, nothing. Just gave me the same diskette drive 0 seek failure and then booted as normal.

Why is this the worst O/S in the history of ever? Doesn't it seem like whoever came up with Vista should call a radio station and claim responsibility for the attack?

Okay, got it to run CHKDSK.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3) ...
335296 file records processsed
File verification completed
3854 large file records processed
0 EA records processed
140 reparse records processed
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3) ...
411334 index entries processed
Index verification completed
0 unindexed files processed
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3) ...
335296 security descriptors processed


Then everything went really fast and basically, it said 0 bad sectors


Now, when I was unable to run the CHKDSK, I was able to do the quickie chkdsk /i and it did say "Windows found problems with the file system," but told me nothing else.

So I'm stuck. It's still doing what it was doing before. And I can't find my Vista o/s disc that came with the computer (probably around here somewhere) or my key for the old XP disc that I have. But my next step is to swap my old XP disc for this one and see if it'll boot up and be an XP computer with a smaller hard drive.