Hard Drive unusable because of Disk Director

I have Disk Director 9 installed on a system that had two installations of WinXP Pro, and Redhat Linux.

I saw an OS Selector message window during a computer boot-up sequence that said my OS Selector configuration files were corrupted.

Since then, I only see the "Acronis Loader .... Press ESC for Menu" text during boot-up. After that text message, the system hangs forever.

When trying to boot using the DD9 CD, can see all my partitions on the bad drive in Disk Director.

Also, if I boot from the DD9 CD, every time I try to run OS Selector I get prompted for my key and it goes through a new installation (which never seems to truly get installed - rebooting from the DD9 CD again goes through a new installation again).

I know that my hard drive is still pretty good, but it just can't boot. I can put the "damaged" drive as a secondary drive in another system, and all my files on the bad drive are visible - and running a disk check on all partitions showed no problems.

I have tried booting using my WinXP CD to get a Windows recovery console, but the system hangs during the "Inspecting hardware" phase of the boot-up.

When I put a previous drive in the corrupted system, everything works fine. The computer isn't damaged.

When I put the "bad" hard drive in a different computer, it hangs at the exact same place during boot-up. It seems to me that the problem exists entirely on the hard drive.

What can I do?

 

Hello azjazz,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition Managing Software.

Since you have problems with the disk even when you boot Windows Installation CD it seems that first of all the disk itself shold be checked with some manufacturer tool. When you boot from CD it doesn't matter what software you have on the hard drive.

Please try to plug your disk to another computer and boot from Windows Installation CD. If the problem persists it is likely that you have hardware problem with the drive.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman