Hard Disk Error

[johnpol78]

I have a sata Hard drive that died

every time i turn the computer on it says disc read error

'Press Ctr l+Alt+Del to Reboot'

I want to know if its possible to stick in an external drive

and use it as my C drive

if so please suggest us the processes.

[Matt]

Yes, you can swap in another hard drive. It's as simple as connecting the sata and power cables. You'll have to format it though and install your OS to actually boot it though.

If you're considering a recovery of the failed drive, SpinRite is excellent.

[Pete_C]

Whether you can use an external (USB or ESATA) drive as your C: boot drive depends on the motherboard. Does it have an option in the boot order to choose USB or ESATA?

If so , yes you can buy a corresponding drive and install windows there (Note you will probably wind up doing the press F6 to load extra drivers and load the appropriate controller drivers before the install cd will be able to see the external drive and install to it).

Alternatively you could do as matt suggested (probably by far the easier approach) and buy an external enclosure and a new drive and put your old drive in the external enclosure and the new drive in the PC and do a clean install and try to recover your data.

Finally there are things which can cause this type of error other than a bad drive.

A dead or weak motherboard cmos retention battery can cause your motherboard to forget what drive you have and how to boot to it. Replacing the battery and reconfiguring your bios will solve this. OR a weak power supply can cause this by not being able to get the drive spinning fast enough before it is called on to boot. It is still not readable so you get the error.

Do you have access to a bootable linux cd? If so can you see the drive and data on it?