ok now im pissed of.

I tried to run Ubuntu on my spare HDD that i ve had sitting in my pc for the last couple of months. so i download the iso and check the file integrity using md5sum as recommended on the ubuntu website it comes back as ok so i burn the cd restart and try to boot from CD, the ubuntu menu appears and i select (i forget what it say, boot from CD?). the CD spins in the drive for a moment before i get a popup saying something along the lines of "cannot read from boot device" so i press restart and try aboot into windows thinking the CD must have burned wrong.

Now comes the big problem, windows wont start, safe mode, last known good config, none of it works i persist in trying to get my PC started eventually it gets into windows and runs a scandisk which shows several unreadable sectors of my main hard drive (not the one i wanted to put linux on). and when i get into windows all my cookies, favorites, passwords, settings ETC have disappeared. i try and do a system restore but this has no effect..

so yeah guess im pretty pissed off

sounds like a bad hard drive.

System Restore only stores drivers, registry settings (I THINK) and EXE/DLL files. It wouldn't have an effect on IE/Firefox temp files or settings.

I find it more likely your HD just decided to up and fail coincidentally.

CONSPIRACY!

If you never got to a point where you could install ubuntu, I doubt it caused the problem. Sucks bad, though

And thus i stopped downloading that Ubuntu iso.
Thanks.

no seriously te, you should download it.

There is absolutely no way that Linux LiveCD was the problem.

Modern hard drives actually have a number of reserved sectors on them. When a write fails, the hard drive flags the sector as 'bad' and it remaps one of its reserved sectors to that one. That way your hard drive doesn't fail right away.

So, what happened here is that all of your reserved sectors have been used up. Which means the problem has been going on for a while. You need to replace that hard drive pronto.


get out