Disk Boot Failure

[bwwkrupp]

Hi, I'm new, I created an email account (since you wont' accept hotmail) just to sign up to seek some help. Sorry to butt in. However I am at a loss, after spending most of the day browsing the internet on my laptop. I went to start up my desktop today and I got "Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter." If insert the disk for the motherboard it comes up with a list 1-9 of options dealing with the raid and the last being FreeDos. If I insert the Windows XP disk it finally gets to a choice of installing XP on the current partition, unusued partition or exit. I want to save my files before I ever install XP over it. So I browsed some more and came across BartPE. Got that disk setup and booted it up and I can't run checkdisk because it saws the system is RAW and lists everything as drive X (not C).

If I have to reinstall windows, fine, but how can I get my files off first?

The computer:

Asus A8N-E motherboard
MSI 7800GT graphics
Maxtor somrthing or other 300 gig harddrive
Two NEC DVD burners
NO Floppy drive
Umm...think thats about it. Very basic setup. Running Windows XP Pro SP 2.

All I know is I shut it down and now its doing this. I'm not adverse to reinstalling windows and starting over (even with a new drive if need be) but I'd really like to get my files off first.

So...

I have some external hard drive cases. Could I hook up the hard drive to one and use my laptop to somehow fix this mess? I don't have another desktop.

Aghh. Time to go work on my car. Too many problems. Thanks in advance, I'm not too computer literate, just enough to keep my head above water. But I'd rather learn how to solve this than pay someone else.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

If you can't find a solution to this problem without having to resort to erasing your hard drive, to back up data you can buy an external hard drive USB enclosure like:

For IDE hard drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...2+1053807122&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=92

For SATA hard drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...2+1053807122&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=92

(the links go to 5.25" enclosures, which will fit either CD-ROM or hard drives. There are 3.5" enclosures that fit hard drives perfectly, but you won't be able to fit CD-ROM drives in the future if for some reason you need to.)

What these do is basically make your internal hard drive into an external USB hard drive.

So to back up your data,

1. Take your hard drive out of your computer.
2. Put it in the USB enclosure, making sure jumpers are set correctly.
3. Turn on enclosure, and connect to your laptop via USB.
4. Use windows explorer to back up files.

Then you can format the hard drive and reinstall Windows.

 

[Thien2810]

Hi bwwkrupp,

How long have you been using your ASUS motherboard and your disk drives? It may be your motherboard that's cooked up.

I just suffered a similar problem of XP not booting up and told me to insert the XP disk.
For my case, I hooked up the hard disks to another system and it booted up just fine. I eventually found out that my motherboard was fried after swapping out all the components, sent it in for an exchange and everything's up again. My swapped motherboard was just 7 months old btw.

Not sure if that is the case for you, but I recommend you follow fuzzy's suggestion first to get your data out.

 

[Tegeril]

You can run a check disk on a disk that is being detected as RAW in many circumstances. Were you using the included BartPE chkdsk command or did you manually run cmd and invoke chkdsk /r x: (or c: or whatever it is)?

 

[bwwkrupp]

If I can get into the BIOS can the motherboard still be fried? All I know is I shut down last night and everything fine and startup the morning and all the problems I've listed here. I used the BartPE chkdsk, I will try again using the cmd prompt. ...ok, I tried using BartPE and ran the Run... with chkdsk as described and does nothing for c: or x:. I tried going into the command prompt and running it again and it states "The type of file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives." for both c: and x:. When I run the command prompt it starts in x:\i386\System32 which I assume is BartPE. If I type c: it states "The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted."

I do have an external hard drive. Between the space available on it (some things are already backed up on it) and the space on my laptop I have about 60-70 gigs to play with. I have about 120 gigs of files on my desktop that I would like to save. However, I can reacquire most of them (backed up elsewhere, redownload, etc.) I figure I have about 20 gigs of personal stuff I can't find elsewhere at all (recent creations). If I can't fix this by tomorrow night I will hook up the hard drive to an external enclosure as described and copy over as much as I can and then reformat and reinstall windows.

I also talked to a friend of mine who is a techie of sorts and he also agrees that this is probably the best way (or repartioning the drive and installing windows in a new partition).

Two questions then:

Can I install windows from disk WITHOUT installing over my old files? If so, how do I do this in the install process

Once I hook up the desktop hard drive in the external enclosure, is there a program I could use to recover the file system and then just pop it back in the tower?

Thanks, I hope this goes well. To sleep! (just worked a 10 hour shift and have a 12 hour one tomorrow, yawn)

 

[Tegeril]

Hm, I guess it actually is messed up significantly then. In many cases in my experience, even when a disk shows as RAW, it is simply a mistake due to some damage to the NTFS file system and it will still begin a check disk. In this case, I'd be definitely going for that external enclosure and maybe a copy of GetDataBack for NTFS or DataRescue for PC if you have trouble viewing files.

I would strongly advise against trying to install Windows on that disk again (or adding partitions) because the chances of losing all the data increase with every adjustment to the file system as we already know there is some damage. Recover your data, fully format the drive, and if you trust it, reinstall.

 

[bwwkrupp]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'm dead tired right now so i won't attempt anything until I have more than an hour free to play with this. But I think I'll go for a new hard drive and installing this as a secondary (was playing with this notion earlier anyways). If you have any other ideas, please post as I'll read this thread again before I do anything, thanks

 

[Laputa]

Your drive may have orphaning directory tree issue where every may be RAW by now. Best is not to try anything further with this drive and go with the above USB + new HDD recommendataions before it gets worse.