My computer has died. (Master boot record error)

[Rogue 9]

Or I think so, anyway. I was playing Freespace when it locked up. It wouldn't respond to anything, so I restarted the computer. Upon restarting, the initial system screen stopped instead of going past like it usually does and said at the bottom that a hard drive failure was imminent, to back up my files and have it replaced, and to press F1 to go to setup or F2 to continue. I hit F2, intending to simply pull my files from the primary hard drive to the secondary (which is more than large enough to hold the primary's entire contents), but apparently the warning came too late; it came to a black screen that simply said "Master boot record error, press a key to continue." Pressing a key does nothing from this point.

I'm hoping my drive's not so dead that I can't recover anything. I know that the master boot record can be fixed, but thanks to HP's retarded backup drive partition rather than operating system CD scheme, the fixes I've found in my brief time searching thus far can't be implemented. Is there anything I can do from here?

[Rogue 9]

Huh. I went back upstairs to try again, and it didn't give me the impending hard drive failure warning, and let me start right into the recovery console. (I didn't try a normal start, since I was hitting F10 from the moment I turned on the power.) I'm running hardware tests now from the console.

[Rogue 9]

The problem appears to have resolved itself for the moment; I'm posting from my own computer again. There was no sign of the problem upon startup after running diagnostics in the recovery console, diagnostics which found no problems with the hard drive at all. I don't trust it, though; I'm pulling all my files to the secondary drive as I type this, and will replace the primary at the earliest opportunity.

[Rogue 9]

The computer freezes and/or crashes at random intervals, and whether it will boot or refuse to while telling me about a master boot record error seems random. I've pulled most of my important stuff, but the problem still needs fixing if there's a means other than buying a new primary hard drive and a copy of Windows.

[Jaepheth]

you can try 'fixmbr' from the recovery console or run check disk, or you can try some of the tools on SystemRescueCD.

Also, download and run a full hard drive diagnostic test from your hard drive's manufacturer.

Looks to me like a dying drive.

[Rogue 9]

Upon startup:

"Disk I/O Error. Press a key to restart."

I'm going to take a wild leap and assume that means it's dead.

[montypython]

I had similar symptoms on one of my drives a while back, best bet at this point is get a replacement drive, you'll have more peace of mind that way.

[Rogue 9]

My wild leap was incorrect; it is not dead. The OS seems to be corrupted, though.

The HP techie I was just talking to is an idiot; he said to get into BIOS by pressing F10, even though F10 opens the recovery console, not BIOS.

[Vertigo1]

If you're getting I/O errors, the drive is on its way out. Get a replacement drive pronto. If it were windows, you'd be seeing shit like blue screens. The random freezes is just either you, or windows, trying to access a bad sector. The drive fails to read the sector, but keeps trying anyways until it "times out" and moves on. The easiest way to detect this if if you hear any loud noises coming from the drive itself when the system "freezes".

[Rogue 9]

There are no loud noises from the drive. I did a repair install of Windows a week ago, and have had no trouble since.