HDD failure

[DarkNovember]

My friend called me today saying that her comp kept rebooting in a loop. She kept getting to the "Start windows normally, last known cofiguration, safe mode" screen. It would then bring up the XP load sreen, then restart. I asked her what she did, she said she just shut it off the night before with no problems. I then asked her how she shut it off, she said she holds in the power button like always. So, I couldn't get XP to load, so I threw in the XP Pro cd to reload the OS and it kept giving me a disk failure.

So, I brought the HDD and the XP Pro disc back to my place. The XP Pro reads fine in my comp, but when I put the HDD in the external case I just bought, I can't see it in "My Computer", but I can see it in my Device Manager, but no the disk management. Is there any way to get to it? It will lock up my comp if I try and open disk management to see it. I also tried using R-Studio, and that locks up when I do a refresh to get it to read the external HDD.

[Cricket]

Go to the hard drive manufacturer's web site and download the diagnostic utility and test that hard drive with it.

Cricket

[DarkNovember]

sweet...thanks cricket

[glc]

she holds in the power button like always.

That is not the proper way to do it. The file system on the drive is probably pretty corrupt by now. If you can't get the drive to mount in your computer with USB, try internally. If it still won't work, put it back in hers and boot it with a hard drive diagnostic CD.

[DarkNovember]

Yeah, I told her that shutting off the comp by the power button is like putting your car in park while doing 70.

I'm gonna throw it back in her comp and run some diag on it later.

Thanks