Was a good day...

Today I was going to get a million xp within a day...
was 30% done then went for a hair cut and picked up some food for the weekend and went home...

it finished streaming those updates, firewall said some where around 341mb anyhow so I defrag, watch tv, come back and reboot and get this....

A Disk Read Error Occurred

google that and find its a wonderful error hard disk drives get, yeah its pretty much uhhh screwed, tried the M$ recovery thing: Unrecoverable errors it couldnt fix... tried fixboot, same error and tried fixmbr with no success...

put it into an external case, IDE to USB and... AUTOPLAY goes for about 5min and says something along the lines of semaphores... yeah I'm all out of idea's...

I would try to install windows but it see's C: as an
[UNKNOWN] partion format and asks to partion it as NTFS to begin
(lose all my data)

all thats left is a low level format.... /sigh

I'll be investing in a DVD burner and alot of DVD+R and RW's....

I'm informing you, maybe you know somthing I have yet to try...

and yes that means I wont be posting that 3 stage dye combo chart anytime soon(I'll have to recreate it)

alot of things to recreate... /sigh

Oh man the updates are going to take forever to reDL again
250MB 2days ago and almost 350MB today? plus the SF update and misc updates? /sigh

Well if you got any ideas to rewrite the MBR or think its NTFS please leave a post.

I got one last idea, some norton disk with HDD utilities... if that doesnt work im off to bed, hope to read some helpful posts.

The real solution is to buy a new HD.

A secondary solution is to connect the HD to another computer, backup important data, put it back into your machine, boot to DOS using a startup disk, delete the NTFS partition, create a FAT32 partition, format the drive, delete the partition, then install XP.

If the drive just has damaged areas, format 'should' mark those areas defective and not allow data to be written to them. Theoretically anyways.

If the drive is in worse shape, it may not even finish the format and you DEFINITELY need a new HD at that point.

In my opinion, the defrag is probably the straw that broke the camel's back.

..and just to add to it..

The issue you're experiencing is hardware failure, not software (IE: MBR, NTFS, missing files, etc).