hard drive attribute #5 fail at boot up
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Thread: hard drive attribute #5 fail at boot up

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Posts
    4

    Question hard drive attribute #5 fail at boot up

    windows XP home OS...
    I ran one of those drive scrubbing routines (Zdelete trial version) that overwrites all unused space on the drive, and here's what happened...
    After about 1 hour, the routine stopped and the computer tried to re-boot, which it could not do (there was a DOS messsage saying the hard drive was not recognized). Tried re-booting again and
    this time it stoped at a DOS screen that says "Imminent hard drive failure detected, back up data now and change hard drive". It also says "Hard drive attribute #5 failed" and gave me the option to continue the boot by pressing F1, which I did, and the system seemed to boot fine. I still get the "attribute #5 fail" DOS screen on all subsequent boot-ups, and pressing F1 results in a (seemingly) good boot-up.

    I did find that the drive scrubbing routine left some HUGE temp files on the disk (sixteen 2GB tmp files, which I deleted manually), so obviously it didn't complete sucessfully.

    I have run scandisk with the option checked to fix file system errors, which didn't seem to help. I have NOT run it with the option checked to scan the disk surface and attempt recovery of bad sectors (I did that a month ago (before this problem) and ended up having to reload the whole OS, so I'm gun-shy about doing that again). Also I have not de-fraged since this happened.

    Any idea what "hard drive attribute #5" is, and why I'm getting this frightening message at boot-up?
    Thanks in advance for any help or ideas.
    ...hal

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2000
    Location
    Friern Barnet, London, England
    Posts
    46,565
    Hi halathome, welcome to Virtual Dr

    I can't find any info on that specific error message, but my feeling is that that program has wiped some of the hard drive's own housekeeping stuff. The first thing I would try is running the hard drive makers diagnostic utility and hope that it can fix the problem. Otherwise I think you're going to need to do a low-level format (which is not as frightening as it sounds, just time-consuming).
    Nick.

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