Sick Vista Disk Can Ubuntu Boot DVD Help?

brush3287

brush3287

Member
My son (the impoverished student) reported to me that his Tosh notebook wouldn't boot. I downloaded & used a couple of times the Recovery CD via this site which worked a treat. Got Vista Home Basic working, but it is very unstable & really won't run anything. Windows Explorer fails a few times as do most other programs. I suspected a disk problem.
I booted the DVD containing Ubuntu 9.10 & it reported errors on the disk - 71 bad sectors! so no wonder Vista was having a bad time!
So what I'm thinking is if I can use the DVD (not installed but running from the DVD) to salvage as much of the data files copied to a USB drive. I then have a choice. I can either try the manufacturers recovery partition or disks, but suspect this won't totally overwrite the duff data areas or try formatting the main partition & try the recovery disks rather than the partition.
Failing that it's a new disk & either Ubuntu or Windows 7.
Any ideas suggestions?
 
boot from the recovery disc > command prompt:

chkdsk /r c:

Run it until no errors are found.
 
Disk is almost certainly dying...

kairozamorro said:
boot from the recovery disc > command prompt:

chkdsk /r c:

Run it until no errors are found.
Click to expand...

Well things improved. Don't get errors in Windows but oh so slow & get the SMART disk error before booting into Windows telling me I should backup data & replace the disk.
No problem I can do that & if my son has the recovery disk(s) we can get Vista back on there. Failing that maybe he'd like to try Ubuntu...
Many thanks for the help.
 
Sure thing, I would start looking for a hard drive replacement though if Windows continues to complain about the disk.
 
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