thathmew said:
whoa. Never heard of anything like that before. I can not imagine what could have caused that. There is a fair amount of disk access, which might stress out an already stressed drive. Do you know if it was fragmented or near-full already? Any idea if there were any bad sectors before the crash? Although Prelude is fairly unstable currently I doubt that it alone could have been the cause.
I'm sorry for my rather hasty reaction. I was a little pissed, that's all...
I bought the laptop about 1,5 years ago and and there is no physical damage that I know of. I haven't had problems of that sort ever - at least in that extent. Everything looks like the crash caused it. But as you think it's more or less impossible...then I guess you're right.
Anyway, here what happened and how it happened in a more detailed way:
I installed PtD about a couple of weeks ago. Crashes were recent but the PC never froze or anything. That was the time scandisk started to run on startup more frequently. Most of the time nothing was found - sometimes though some minor issues as some damaged files occured. Then came the crash I talked about - this was on Friday. The result was a damaged Windows\System32\Config\System . With my acer-recovery-CD I could boot though and scandisk solved the problem - for then. An HD tool found out that the HD is severly damaged and beyond repair. Since that the PC freezes on most shutdowns and wants to run scandisk on most startups. I kept on playing PtD, the HD is damaged anyway so I hoped to finish it before buying a new one (no money right now...). But hey, today that message telling me about a damaged Windows\System32\Config\System once again showed up - but this time even the recovery-CD couldn't force the system to boot. I cleansed the Windows partition and reinstalled Windows XP - and so far everything works fine.
Alright, now that you pointed out the thing with the fragmented and near-full HD - yes, it was both near-full *and* fragmented. Both partitions. I deleted some of the larger files and defragmented both partitions about the time I installed PtD - but there were no bad partitions as far as I know. But yes, this can have caused it. Well, here is another and perhaps more logic assumption as to what happened:
The HD indeed was somehow physically damaged - perhaps the laptop fell down or something (I have a younger sister who's rather careless about such precious things
). Some part of the HD got damaged - but it wasn't until now that the HD was almost full that scandisk found the damaged parts.
Anyway, I'm sorry for those hasty accusations. You know, the precious laptop, the emotions, the...bah, let's get back to PtD.
EDIT:
Holy shit, I wrote PoD instead of PtD everywhere.
And I don't even like POD all that much...