Hi there, I really hope someone can help me here. I am having a nightmare with my PC this week and it has been perfectly fine for the last two years until my problems started a few days ago,, it's driving me a bit mad! I must apologise for such a long post in advance as well, but I'm not sure specifically what's wrong here.

I'll explain whats happened from the start of the problem. A few days ago my computer seemed to completely die on me so i decided it was time for a fresh install. I think I may have picked up a virus which scrambled the registry despite me using AVG and Zone alarm as my security. My computer was filesharing overnight (something it has done for 2 years with no probs!) when I came back to it in the morning the tool bar had gone black and nothing was working at all. I had to restart the computer and it went into the boot menu of options to start windows in safe mode , normal mode etc. No matter which option I chose the computer would keep rebooting and never get into windows again. Ok so now is the point I decided to delete the partition on my C: and reformat and reinstall. I have done this before so the process is no problem, I am confident of that.
After re-installing windows xp (home edition) my computer seems to have a corrupt and unreadable hard drive in some areas. I am fortunately able to surf the web so I can find help but that is about it. Everything else seems scrambled and corrupt. For e.g. if I click on windows help the following message appears in the toolbar, and this meesage appears for several files or pages I try and open '' c:\ $MFT is corrupt file or directory, or is unreadable. Pls run chkdsk ''
I have tried to download some of my applications and firewalls again from the web but everytime I try and download anything I get another error message saying that the web page is unavailable or contains no data. (something like that)
This also causes me problems when I try and follow advice on some other webpages to clean the disk (if this is the problem), I cannot download any app's!!!
Messenger service also keeps popping up and telling me a registry cleaner is recommended and shows links to free ones but that is useless as I cannot download anything!
I decided to try running chkdsk and it appears to have not fixed my problem. I have also tried re-installing windows xp home edition again but the same things are happening all over again.
I have no idea what has happened, have I been hacked and destroyed lol!
Maybe a corrupt file has spread a virus into my computer that cannot be removed by re-installing windows and reformatting the hard drive? My PC was perfectly fine, clean well organised and protected so I am really lost as to what has happened and how to fix it.
If anyone can help I would be extremely grateful and happy, that is if it is repairable. I am fearing I need a new hard drive, this one seems to be defunct !

Hey there welcome to Pchf , just a few questions.


-How do things look in device manager? Any warnings?

-Can you redetect your HDD in your BIOS?

-Can you try a different HDD IDE cable?

- Are you installing from a legit cd ?

- Can you post your system specs





Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions .

Thanks for replying mate, I'll just get all the info for you, 5 mins... Yes my discs are legitimate Windows XP home edition

Ok I cannot check device manager, here is what comes up when i try and check,
''MMC cannot open the file c:\WINDOWS\system32\devmgmnt.msc
This may be because the file does not exist, is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also be because you do not have the rights to access this file''

When my computer starts up it says both hard drive names then -- capable but disabled.

I'm not sure what you mean by redetect ,my HDD in the BIOS. IDE cable should be fine.

The computer spec is AMD sempron(tm)2200+ , 1.51GHz, 448mb ram

two hard drives, faulty one is 40GB (for app's and operating system) other drive is 120GB

Hope this helps you, any ideas?

Thanks for the information it should help the technical team respond quicker , i'm going to hand it over to the Technical staff now.



Good luck .

Hey Timmmay!
My welcome to PC Helpforum!

Pretty sure this is not about a virus or some, those would for sure be removed on the reinstall.

It looks indeed more like you got a bigger problem with your harddisk.

I guess you won't be able, and won't like, to install XP on your other drive?

Are you able to use (maybe borrow), a third drive to try and install XP on that?

Blue

I don't want to install windows on my other hard drive, what do you think is wrong with the current one? Is it possible to fix I may not have been running chkdsk the right way, it all seems very strange to me.