Boot sector keeps dissapearing.

[RedScorp]

Hi.

It seems that each time I reboot my machine now I have 50/50 chances of loosing my boot sector. Have to fix it with the XP's repair console, "fixboot" command.

What I have now is A64 3200 (the 2.2GHz 512K version) on a MSI Neo Platinum running XP Pro. The hard drive is fresh out of the RMA. Tomorrow I will have a chance to test it with another hard drive, but the maxtor's powermax utility certifies this drive error free...

Any ideas?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Have you tried a different cable to eliminate the chance the present one is faulty? Everything running stock speeds? Is the drive alone on the cable? I'd also run fixMBR on it, and if you haven't run spy&adware scans along with a full system AV scan I'd do that ASAP too.

 

[RedScorp]

yes, i've tried fixmbr, replacing the cable and running the drive alone. I don't see how can this thing possibly be a virus if I've rearranged the partitions with fdisk and formatted the drive before doing a clean WinXP install. Everything is running at stock speeds and even lower.
The only thing that worries me here - can this possibly be a memory problem? Or rather a faulty memory controller on the chip, since this is the first AMDs processor with an onboard memory controller, it could easily be buggy.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

What ram is it? Have you tried running memtest86+ on it yet? If not that would be the next step, along with trying the drive on the 2nd IDE connector to see if the primary is faulty. If none of that helps but the other drive works properly then at least you'll know it was the drive despite passing diagnostics.

 

[RedScorp]

Ok.
This is going to sound really weird.
But.
As long as the WinXP CD is in the drive, it's booting up fine, after offering me to boot from the CD by pressing any key, which I don't do.
If I take the CD out of the drive, it does not find the boot sector.
I'm really tired of this...

 

[RedScorp]

And I have figured it out...
This is really frustrating.
Turns out that motherboard had an extra setting for the hard disk boot priority, and it was detecting my Promise ATA controller as SCSI so it automatically gave it the first priority. And it's either an algorithm I don't understand, or a glitch in the bios, but apparently if it does not find boot partition on that first hard drive it tries, it stops looking... Or something. I hope when I reboot right now the problem will not appear back, otherwise I'm going to forget about socket 754 altogether