HOW TO: Preserve AlienRespawn - stock drive to aftermarket drive / AlienRespawn Q&A

[knightmare23]

i have encountered a disk read error and was planning to use the alienware respawn. when i pressed F12 the boot screen hangs. am i doing something wrong or is it just that long to load the boot options?

[Mr. Fox]

i have encountered a disk read error and was planning to use the alienware respawn. when i pressed F12 the boot screen hangs. am i doing something wrong or is it just that long to load the boot options?

I'm willing to bet the disk read error and the hanging are related. Sounds like you may have a hard drive that is either corrupted or dying. Probably a bad hard drive.

[knightmare23]

so i need to replace the hard disk?

[Mr. Fox]

You can run some diagnostic tests on the hard drive, but that is what it sounds like to me. If you are getting disk read errors and having trouble getting into the boot menu, something is definitely wrong.

Can you can be a little more specific and detailed in describing the problem? When do you see the disk read error? While booting, or after Windows is loaded?

[knightmare23]

after the boot screen. then i restarted it and tried to run the alienrespawn from my flash drive. after about 15 mins the recovery started to boot and it stops at the windows screen (blue wallpaper i believe the default for win 7) with a mouse icon. that is the screen right now.

[Mr. Fox]

Were you attempting to run Respawn because of the disk read error, or did the disk read error begin to occur with the attempt to run Respawn? If you did not have this issue before attempting to run Respawn, you may data corruption and the disk might be OK. If you were attempting to fix the disk read error by running Respawn, that may not be possible.

If you are seeing text on the screen that says "Disk read error" it's not a good sign.

[knightmare23]

i see... i was attempting to fix it with respawn..so if i replace the HDD it would be fixed?

[Mr. Fox]

i see... i was attempting to fix it with respawn..so if i replace the HDD it would be fixed?

Most likely, my friend. You can try running a diagnostic drive tool from a bootable USB drive or CD to confirm the drive is hosed. You will need to go into the BIOS and change the boot order so the USB and/or optical drive comes before the hard drive(s). If you're under warranty, call 1-800ALIENWARE.

If you have dual drives, install the secondary (slave) drive in place of the first and reinstall the OS using the Alienware Restore DVD. The part of this that sucks would be that you'll no longer have the Respawn partition. It would be a long shot with a bad drive, but you could try a disk imaging tool and try copying your partitions from the primary HDD to the secondary (or replacement) HDD. If the drive is truly unreadable, that will not work.

What computer system are you running? I recommend you update your signature with information about your system. While your current problem is pretty generic, it's helpful to know, and sometime required to know, in order to receive effective support.

[knightmare23]

its fixed now..apparently a disk check did the trick thanks for ur advise

[Mr. Fox]

Awesome news. Glad to hear the disk check fixed it. If the problem returns again you'll know the drive is going bad. Sometimes a disruption in power or a surge can cause issues like this. Hopefully, that's all that happened.