friends windows drive crashed
 

my roommate has 'disk error' on his windows hard drive, and has a bunch of school stuff on it... is there anything i can do by connecting his drive to my computer to try and get anything back?

You could try to mount it with Linux and see if you can pull anything off of it.

But is this a BIOS error, or something Windows is telling him?

well, its weird... first off, he is running xp.. sometimes it will get to the boot screen and just stay there forever.. other times it will just say something like boot error, cant read disk... but i konw the address locations of the errors form when winblows tried to fix it

obtain "knoppix", it can boot from cdrom, and load the windows partitions, it will not effect the original windows install. You can backup his files, then use knoppix to repair the broken windows. on a further note it sounds like the box has a loose power supply connection.

Sounds to me like the "wonderful" Windoze disk tools failed to properly fix the disk, or more appropriately "fixed it but good." Scandisk has ruined many a drive before.

I agree that a knoppix disk is a good way to try to pull the data off. If there isn't a lot of stuff (like under 64MB or so), I would try to use a USB key drive or an SD Card with reader to pull the data off, using knoppix.

After that you can try to figure out whether it's the data that's nerfed or the drive itself that is failing.

herer are the specifics of what happened before the crash... the computer would restart while norton did a dull system scan, specifically it would restart at the c:\i386 directory. i had 2 thoughts, 1 a virus, and 2 disk error... so i tried to just copy over the i386 directory, and got a disk read error on a specific file... then i rebooted to see if the chkdsk - or whatever it is - could fix it and i get this

file record segmetn 2280 is unreadable
file record segmetn 15892 is unreadable

then on the second stage i get this

deleting index entry MDXIRCC.IN_ in index $I30 of file 18A
deleting index entry MDMXIRMP.IN_ in index $I30 of file 18A

then it said

chkdsk is reparing files
an unexpected error occured


now nothign will boot... but i have a slackware cd, i think i can boot from that.. but thanks a lot guys