failed hard drive = XP reboot loop, help please

[liquidmonkey]

I have 4 hard drives and one of them failed the other day when I was trying to play a video clip. When trying to play it with WMP9 it would freeze so then I had to go into ‘task manager’ and ‘end the process’. I did this 2 times and then the 3rd time my computer shut down and went into a looped re-boot mode.
PC Boot would be good, the windows logo screen would come up, but then it would disappear and a blue error screen would come up for a split second. I have not been able to see what the specific error as the computer goes to re-boot but have seen it say ‘windows has been halted to prevent damage from occurring to your computer’ or something like that.
I was very worried in the beginning but after unplugging each HD, I have concluded which HD is the cause. So at least everything else works ok, whew!
One other thing to mention is that the failing HD is a Maxtor 160Gig SATA drive filled with only 250MB empty. I’m thinking this is a cause but not sure.
Does anyone know of something I could try to get this drive working again? I do need the information on it.
Thanks in advance

PS – after this scare I did a major back-up of all other important info I could access.

 

[Christian Darrall]

well when it comes up to the bsod (blue screen of death) press pause break, this should pause the screen allowing you to see the prob,

my remedee for this is have the backup copy not on this harddrive and redo or install the os again.

 

[diduknowthat]

lol i had that same error a few weeks ago. I took a video of my bsod, then found the frame where it displayed the split second flash, my error was bad boot sector. Use a digital camera or something and take a video of your screen and tell us the error.