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Inspiron 531 - Dreaded Vista crcdisk.sys error on startup - at wits end!
Hello All,
I'm helping a friend out with his Inspiron 531 and have tried everything I can think of to get out of this hole.
Machine halts during Vista start up, displays bouncing progress bar with regular hard disk activity, then screen clears to black screen (no mouse or flashing cursor) and then hard drive light stops activity, and only 'blips' about every 30-40 seconds. There is no further activity if machine is left.
Did F8 to try start in Safe mode - last driver to load is shown as crcdisk.sys, then hangs.
Tried disconnecting all devices apart from hard drive, keyboard and mouse - same result.
Ran Dell diags on all system parts - all passed.
Tried Vista F8 and fix mode - choose to fix start up errors, system appears to go into routine to do this, but nothing progresses - and hard drive reverts to 'blip' during this.
Tried Dell Factory image restore - routine goes into 'formatting hard drive' but again although progress bar bounces back and forth, hard drive is still only blipping periodically and I have tried leaving this for 13 hours!
Ran Seagate tests against hard drive - all passed OK
Used Vista recover CD (not Dell one as we don't have Dell Vista DVD as it didn't ship with one) to boot from, even if I try to do a chkdsk from here, don't get any response or output from chkdsk and hard drive only blips.
Really at my wits end here.....
- Hard drive must be physically OK or Seagate and Dell diags would have reported a problem
- Blasted Dell factory restore doesn't even format the drive
- Don't have Dell Vista install DVD to try running reinstall from there
Does anyone have any clues as to where I should look next...... pretty flummoxed on this one - why does the drive keep going into this blipping mode even when trying a simple chkdsk ?
PS - When booting on the recover CD I was able to navigate to the C drive and checked out the windowsupdate.log file and it appears the problems started after an attempted Vista update that then required a system restart, which of course has not happened successfully since, Although I don't understand if or why this would prevent me from attempting and failing to do the factory restore.
Thanks!
Doodtoo
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May 15th, 2009 11:00
If you have not fixed this here is how I dealt with the same situation.
NOTE-this process results in a complete and clean install of Vista, you will loose any data on the hard-drive
Start computer
At Bios Boot screen hit F12
switch boot to DVD/CD Boot w/Vista Install disk in drive
Wait for Partition screen
Delete ALL partitions (use advanced options to do this)
remove install disk, do not restart computer
put driver disk into computer
from partition window (you left it alone right?)
click "install drivers"
You need to reinstall the SATA driver (this will eliminate, in theory, the CRCDISK.SYS lockup and facilitate the rest of the install)
Once SATA driver is reinstalled replace driver disk with install disk (if you have something other than SATA drive you may have to try different drivers)
Finish installation, this should fix the problem
Good luck.
klawso01
1 Message
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July 25th, 2009 15:00
Thank you Doodtoo. I had the same problem. I spent hours on the phone w/ Dell as they tried to walk me through fixing the issue, and was unable to since I had to leave. Then 5 minutes on the web, with your response and I was back up and running in 15 minutes. Thank you.
brendanmuldoon
1 Message
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October 9th, 2010 05:00
in relation to the advice above..
12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
My Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop is not able to boot windows since installing windows SP1.
When I boot to safe mode, it stalls at crc.disk error.
I have the original install cd. However when I boot from the CD/DVD drive, it get a BLUE screen relating to a serious error. The auto advice it to disable BIOS cache and shadow settings (or something like that).
I would be happy to completely wipe the system and reinstall Windows 7. I have a copy of Windows 7 Pro, which I have installed on my PC.
any idea how i can boot windows or reinstall?
Xandict
6 Posts
0
May 20th, 2011 16:00
I'm having the same problem. Got as far as putting it the dell/vista reinstall dvd and booting from it. It then gives me the blue screen saying to disable BIOS cache and shadow settings. I can't get to the vista re-install screen. Any help?