Whenever I turn on my computer it says "incorrect disc or disc error?

Whenever I turn on my computer it says "incorrect disc or disc error". Is my computer completely dead? Can I fix it, or do I need to take it in to a professional?

Asked by geeklovegirl 58 months ago Similar questions: turn computer incorrect disc error Computers > Hardware > Desktops & Laptops.

Similar questions: turn computer incorrect disc error.

Assuming you have not accidentally left a floppy in the drive, then you likely have a corrupt boot record. This is a good description of how to repair the master boot record (MBR): pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/... Sources: about. Com .

There are a few things you can try before taking it to a pro... What you try is really going to depend on how comfortable you are with opening up your computer's case, and how important the data on the disk is to you. Here's what I would try: 1. Open up your computer's case and make sure that your hard drive has its power and data cables attached correctly.

If the drive is an IDE/EIDE drive then you're going to have a wide ribbon cable coming out of the drive and running to the motherboard. If the drive is an SATA then you're going to have a much thinner cable running to the motherboard. Check to make sure that the cable connectors are firmly connected to both the drive and the motherboard.

Once you've done this reboot the PC and see if the drive responds this time. 2. If you made sure that your cables were firmly attached but the drive is still not responding then you probably have either a bad boot sector on the disk, or the controller on the disk has failed.

If it's the latter then there's not much you'll be able to do yourself (more on this later. ) If it's the former and you're running Windows XP then you can try repairing the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the boot sector. To do this, boot your PC up with the XP installation CD in the CD-ROM drive.

When asked what you want to do, select the 'Boot to Recovery Console' option. If XP can at least detect the hard drive then you can try the 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' commands to try and repair any boot record faults. If you get this far then reboot your PC and allow it to try booting from your hard drive again.

If it works then all is well. If not, then... 3. You've suffered a drive failure, most probably in either the drive motor or the drive controller.

You now have to make a decision based on how valuable the data on that disk is to you. If you have a recent backup or can afford to lose the data then buy yourself a replacement drive, reinstall your operating system and move on. If the data on the disk is vital to you then you're going to have to get in touch with one of the specialist data recovery services such as Disk Doctors (http://www.diskdoctors.com/windows-data-recovery.asp).

Bear in mind though, it's going to cost a LOT of money to recover the data - it can quite often be in the order of $200 to $1000 dollars depending on the type of damage and the amount of data. Of course, there are steps that you can take in the future to reduce the impact of a drive failure: Regular backups - It's been said many times before, but it bears repeating. Regular backups of your important data are worth their weight in gold.

If you only have a small amount of data important to you (say less than 20GB) then occasionally backing up to DVD-R/DVD+R will almost certainly be adequate. If you have significantly more data than that then you may want to go with backing up to an external drive (Seagate and Western Digital both make excellent external units. ) If you have a good broadband connection then an alternative to backing up to an external hard drive is to sign up with one of the many offsite backup service providers available.

RAID 0 - RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID-0 is a configuration of two or more disks (typically two disks for a small home setup. ) When you write data to one disk it is automatically written to the second disk at the same time.

This way, if one of your hard disks fails you'll have a functioning backup on the second disk. This doesn't save you from things like lightning strikes or fires - both drives will be destroyed in those situations - but it does protect you from most of the typical drive failures. If you're lucky then your motherboard has a RAID controller built onto it.

If that's the case then setting up RAID can be as simple as plugging two identical drives into your computer and enabling a few simple BIOS options. If not then you'll need to buy a RAID controller such as the Adaptec SATA RAID Controller (around $60) before you can create the array. Mindwarp's Recommendations Adaptec SERIAL ATA RAID 1210SA KIT ( 2015000 ) Amazon List Price: $0.00 Average Customer Rating: 3.0 out of 5 (based on 1 reviews) Seagate Technology 200 GB USB 2.0 and FireWire External Drive ( ST3200823A-RK ) Amazon List Price: $0.00 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 108 reviews) Western Digital WDG1U2500 My Book Essential Edition 250 GB Hard Drive Amazon List Price: $199.99 Used from: $124.00 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 54 reviews) .

If yes, try removing it and restarting the computer.

It's possible you have a disk problem. Make sure you don't have a CD in the drive, and restart your system. It's a laptop?

Or a desktop? Well, if it was a laptop, I would pull the battery after shutdown and see. You might press on drives and make sure every thing is inserted.

If you have PCMCIA cards pull 'em. Desktop? Pull all usb cables out, pull disks out of drives and if this doesn't work, well, you can try and open it up and see if cables are inserted.

Sources: My answer .

1 Click the little button on your disc drive and take out the disc in there.. failing that unplug any USB devices.. failing that make sure you don't have a floppy drive in, failing that take it into a professional, it's probobly the hard drive.

Click the little button on your disc drive and take out the disc in there.. failing that unplug any USB devices.. failing that make sure you don't have a floppy drive in, failing that take it into a professional, it's probobly the hard drive.

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