Bott problems

[andyeye]

Hi,
I've just been given a Thinkpad r50e (1834 - J9G).

It will not boot, on startup the screen appeard where you can access the Bios btu immediatly after that says "a disk error occured Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".
It will not go any further than that.
I can access the bios and it appears to see the hdd.
I have downloaded from ibm the .iso file and made a diagnostic cd and it loads ok, as I watch it go through it's process I can see at one point it says "no fat 32 volumes found, exiting..." but then then it goes through a process of loading file to address thatthen it continues to the"[dr dos] a:\>" prompt.

it appears to me there is a partition on the hdd that contains recovery files but I can't seem to access them, has any one any ideas to assist before I fork out for a nother version of windows and format the hdd and start again?

Thanks in anticipation,
Andy

It seems to me that it is not seeing the hdd p

[carbon_unit]

I would run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and make sure the Hard Drive is good before continuing.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

[andyeye]

Thanks Carbon, I tried that but the cd just brings up the bad read message, the hdd sounds like it starts up, I've tried swapping the hdd with another from a different laptop and that didn't seem to work, any other ideas..is there any way of getting hold of a recovery cd/dvd easily?

[carbon_unit]

I've never heard of a bad read message. Can you be more descriptive please?

[andyeye]

all i get when i try the hitachi dft is a few clicks and whirs from the cd rom then i get a pause when the screen goes black then "a disk error occured Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". appears.
i can navigate to the hdd in the command prompt (looks like dos) and can see the files on dir/p but i can't get the [censored] thing to boot up

[phool@round]

At the Thinkpad splash screen press F12 to bring up the boot device list then choose "cdrom drive". That will boot the cd. Or, something is amiss with the way the cd was burned and it's not being read and bypasses it to the next boot device, the Hard Disk. Hitting F11 at the splash brings up any recovery partition on the drive. Give it another go round mate and report back in "detail".

Here's a link to help you help yourself in the mean time; http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R50e

Download this in particular; ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mo ... 9t2462.pdf