Help Windows XP will not boot

[daddio1949]

Hi,

My son's computer is unable to boot up, it hangs while trying to boot from the hard drive, C:. The drive is recognized in the bios, and the computer has been running since July under Windows XP. The drive was setup for NTFS. I examined the c drive (Western Digital 120 GB) with the Western Digital diagnostics in DOS, and the program found no problems with the drive. I believe that the boot sector on the drive is corrupted.

I pulled the drive and inserted it into another XP machine. Neither the MS disk tools nor Norton Disk Doctor (2002) were able to access and fix the drive. Does anybody have an ideas about fixing the drive?

Greg

 

[Doh!]

Can you boot in safe mode? How about trying the last good configuration option? If all fails, run the repair option from the Windows XP installation CD.

 

[daddio1949]

Hi,

The PC will not boot at all, it completely hangs before WinXP starts. How do I run the repair option from the cd? Will the repair erase the contents of the drive?

 

[oog]

When you put the disk in another computer, it was recognized in the bios, right? Were you able to read the contents of the drive then? If not, then check to see that it was attached correctly (for instance, that it is jumpered to be a slave if that's how you plugged it in). If it still doesn't work, then I would be doubtful that an XP repair will fix it.

 

[daddio1949]

Hi,

When I moved the drive to another computer, the drive was recognized, but I am unable to access the drive from Windows XP. By access, MS explorer will not show its contents, & nor would Norton Disk Doctor work with it.

The Western Digital diagnostics program. DLG Diagnostic, indicated that the drive was in good working order. I have been browsing the internet & came upon the DiskPatch 1.0 (MBR, partition table and boot sector recovery) program sold at http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/DiskPatch.htm. Has anybody have any experience with this program? According to their web site DiskPatch was previously called RepoMan. If anybody has any experiece with it, how easy is it to repair the boot sector?

 

[KF]

Both the MBR and partition table are on the very first sector of the HD. The boot sector is the first sector on a partition. It is very simple to repair the MBR and boot sector using the XP install disk to boot from, and choosing Recovery Console. After that you get a prompt. Type FIXMBR to fix the MBR. Type FIXBOOT to fix the boot sector. However that won't work if the partition table is corrupt, since there will be no way to find any partition, or consequently the boot sector.

But recovering a bad partition table, if that program can do it, is a remarkable capability. Actually if there was only one partition it should be almost obvious what the table ought to be, provided you knew what details go in the table, so I can believe the program could figure it out. A bad partition table would be one reason XP could not show ithe HD contents. Another reason could be the file system is corrupt. (Or maybe encrypted?) In which case, the files will be inaccessible.

How valuable is the data on the HD? If it is of no value, that diagnotic disk/CD should be able to zero the first sector on the HD, and from there you should be able to use the HD as if it were new.

 

[Rereg]

FWIW...I had a similar experience and found my problem was a cpu that goes past the bios ok but when it tries to boot into xp it would crash. After swapping various parts I found that other cpus would boot but that one no longer will.

 

[daddio1949]

Hi,

I have been in contact with Bob Green who authored the program BootMaster Partition Recovery, http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz. He has graciously provided some assistance.

I used BootMaster (freeware), to determine that the MBR is OK, and both the primary and backup boot sectors are probably OK. The diagnostic program was unable to mount the partition using the boot sectors' pointers to the Master File Table and its mirror. It appears that the file system has suffered some corruption, but appears that it is not going to be fixable.

Bob recommended two programs to use: (1) a free one at http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm; and (2) a commercial program - $99, http://www.lc-tech.com/filerecovery.htm. The free one did not help, and I obtained a demo of the the commerical program, filerecovery professional 3.2 demo.

Now I have to determine if the contents of the drive is worth $99.