Storage Medium Error...

[NoctisReitop]

I've taken a look at an associate's computer who has been complaining of it being slow for quite some time now. I had taken a look at it when he had first gotten it, so I knew how it should be performing. When I sat down to examine it the other day, I was amazed at how truly slow it was -- undescribably. One error keeps popping up no matter what happens:

"Storage Medium Errors Cause Unexpected Program Crash In Windows XP 884070"

This is somewhat misleading to me because he's running Vista Home Premium 32 bit. Due to some other problems, I had the suspicion of a bad sector or something, but with a little googling of this error, my suspicions were confirmed, though it looks like the possibilty of straight up damage. I tried running chkdsk and it didn't really help. He had quite a bit of spyware and whatnot, but the scanners will not run for long because they all crash because of the problem with the disk. I don't want to format because he bought his computer used and his Vista is the only OS he has at his disposal. I was hoping that maybe there's a disc doctor of sorts that could determine where the damaged parts of the disc were, isolate them, delete the data there and the program using that data, and whatnot. I must admit that I haven't exhausted my other resources as far as researching this problem on my own, but I figured this would be a nice and trusted preliminary opinion... Thanks guys.

-Noctis

[gvblake22]

I don't understand why you can't try a reformat? If he's got the Vista install disk, that should be all that is needed to start over from scratch.

[NoctisReitop]

No, he has no os disc at all. If I formatted, it'd leave him with a pile of hardware. He bought his computer used with no software at all . It does have a partition called "Recovery" that's 8.11 gigs, but I can't explore it and I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the way that these computer manufacturers do their stuff. It's a compaq presario, for the record. If we had a disc (mainly a cd-key that isn't in use) I'd have already formatted.

[drew and not u]

You can boot from the recovery partition (usually by pressing an F-key during bootup, it should tell you somewhere on the boot screen). This will allow you to restore the PC to it's factory state. Just find out what key you need to hit to launch the recovery system and you're golden.