Advent 9315 laptop, crcdisk.sys causing BSOD

[garymce]

Hi there

A friend's given me her laptop to look at, apparently she was doing a driver update, and her laptop crashed while rebooting. We tried booting it in Safe Mode, it was loading the drivers and once it reached crcdisk.sys, it did nothing for about ten seconds, then we saw the quick flash of a blue screen before it rebooted itself.

Using F8, we told it not to reboot on fail and saw that the error code was the following: STOP: 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

We tried to load the Vista install disc to do a chkdsk or system restore or something like that, but unfortunately it's not working on her laptop. It'll load up the Vista splash screen with the shiny green background, but no dialog box for picking your language appears, and the hard drive and optical drive both stop responding as well, leaving us having to do a hard reboot on the laptop.

Next we tried booting from a Ubuntu 9.10 disc, which loaded up fine. However when we got to the desktop, a popup box warned that one of the hard drives on the laptop was ready to fail. We opened the Ubuntu disk manager and it told us that her hard disk has over 80 bad sectors on it, and we couldn't find an option to try and repair anything.

Now we're quite stumped. We'd rather not have to try and replace the hard drive if possible, but we're not sure what to do next.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I've tried several different solutions such as changing the BIOS settings as Microsoft's article on 0x000000ED recommends, but her BIOS allows almost nothing to be changed other than the boot order.

Thanks for your time

-Gary

[gnuman]

It does sound like the HDD sadly. Do you have SMART test enabled in the BIOS? Did you see where the bad sectors were as it is possible if recovery is failing it could be in the Master Boot Record and would cause the failure.

[garymce]

There's no mention of SMART in the BIOS. Her BIOS is a very stripped down one in terms of configuration. If you look at the HDD under the Main page, all it says is the following:

Maximum Capacity: 120GB

Transfer Mode: [FPIO 4 / DMA 2]

Ultra DMA Mode: [Mode 5]

None of these can be altered.

[macf13nd]

I owned one of these laptops. awful!