C Drive became D drive

[Danse]

Ok, this is very strange. My PC was working just fine a couple nights ago, and then I woke up yesterday morning and it was showing a boot screen with "ntldr is missing" at the bottom. It made some weird clicking/clunking noise when I tried to reboot it a couple times. It isn't doing that anymore though. I used the WinXP disc and went into recovery mode and got to the prompt and it's showing my D drive as my windows drive instead of my C drive. I have two SATA hard drives in the box, and both have been fine up until now. It looks like all my files are still intact on the drives too, the drive letters are just messed up.

Anyone have any idea what might be going on here?

WinXP Pro
Core 2 Duo E6300
EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR Motherboard
2GB Buffalo Firestix PC2-6400 RAM
Radeon X1950PRO 256MB GDDR3
500GB WD5000KS SATA II
300GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA
LiteOn SH-16A7S-05 SATA DVD Burner

 

[Poohbee]

If I remember correctly, windows assigns C: to the first drive it sees.... I might be mistaken though. Try to unplug your secondary drive and leave the drive with the windows installed on it and boot the computer. After hopefully window loads, shut it down and hook up the secondary drive. If bot are back to normal, check the disk integrity with with the chkdsk.exe /F command at the dos prompt or you can scan for problems under the tools menu when you right click on a drive letter. Hope this helps you in a some way.

 

[cprince]

I would try to backup the data first because I think that the drive is failing.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Dl the seagate seatools and run it to check the status of your maxtor and get the wd utility to check your wd drive. Something is definately amiss and you need to determine what it is before data loss occurs.

 

[Danse]

Ok, quick rundown on the partition situation. The WD 500GB drive has 2 partitions, one for my C drive which is 100GB, and the rest which used to be my E Drive. The 300GB Maxtor has 3 partitions which were my D, F, and G drives.

I ran the diagnostic tools. The WD extensive scan came back with no errors. The Seagate extensive scan said that there were index errors on all 3 of the partitions of the Maxtor, and said that it could be due to an incorrect shutdown of Windows and suggested running chkdisk. So I did that on all of my partitions. It didn't find any bad sectors.

So, I tried just booting with only the WD drive hooked up since it has the C drive on it. Now I'm getting a different error message:

"INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 14. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

I've googled around for info on that one and can't find much that's consistent, so I figured I'd ask here before trying anything else yet. Any ideas what I should do at this point?

 

[Danse]

One more thing to note... I am considering trying to reinstall WinXP by doing a repair install. Has anyone done this? How likely is it that my applications and settings will remain intact? Should I try hooking up both drives first (since some apps are installed on the Maxtor too), or should I just leave the one with the C drive attached and add the other one afterwards? If anyone's got experience with this, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

 

[Heinrich]

I have done 'repair install' repeatedly over the last 4 years or so (it's been awhile now, hasnt' it!) and never lost anything except when my hard drive hardware itself was flaky. However, I always tried recovery console first. Installing a whole new instance of windows and pulling data / reinstalling programs is cleaner and is good housekeeping.

 

[Danse]

Well... I thought I'd come back and follow up on this. I replaced my motherboard and everything went fine for a couple of weeks. Then it happened again. This time I was near the PC when it happened. I had just been browsing the web and went to grab a drink. As I was coming back to the room, I heard the beep of the POST process as my PC was trying to reboot. When I got to the room, it had the NTLDR is Missing message on the screen.

This time I guess I was thinking a bit more clearly and went directly into the BIOS. My Western Digital WD5000KS drive was not showing up under the SATA devices. I thought that was pretty strange and a good hint that that drive may be the real problem, even though when I ran the extensive WD diagnostic on it, it passed just fine. I shut the box down for maybe half an hour before I decided to see what else I could do. I went directly back into the BIOS again this time and the WD drive showed up. I thought that was weird. So I tried rebooting and got the NTLDR is Missing message again. So I went back into the BIOS and noticed that my second drive was set to be the primary boot device. I guess it must have automatically been set to that when the WD drive disappeared that first time. So I switched it back to the WD drive and it booted up fine.

So now I'm wondering what the heck is wrong with this WD drive that would make it act like this. It not only disappeared, it did so while I was in the middle of browsing the web and caused my PC to reboot. Could it be a heat issue? It has one of the fans on the front of the case blowing right on it. I don't have any way to really measure the temp on it accurately though. Anyone got any other ideas about what might cause this?


WinXP Pro
Core 2 Duo E6300
EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR Motherboard
2GB Buffalo Firestix PC2-6400 RAM
Radeon X1950PRO 256MB GDDR3
500GB WD5000KS SATA II
300GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA
LiteOn SH-16A7S-05 SATA DVD Burner

 

[simondedalus]

but what about the C drive .............is it intact ............your have mentioned D drive's transformation ...........but what about the C?

 

[simondedalus]

sorry it was repeated unintentionally..........

 

[Danse]

My C partition is on the WD drive. I ended up reformatting and reinstalling when I replaced my motherboard. Didn't lose any data since I was able to back up what I needed from the C drive by using a BartPE disc, and my other partitions were still intact.

 

[vanvock]

Bad or loose cable on drive?

 

[Danse]

I checked the connection a little while ago. It seems to be connected fine. The cable came brand new with the motherboard. I'll see if I can find another one to switch it out, but I'm doubting that that's the problem.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yeah. Bad cables or lose connectors can cause something like this. A problem with the power supply might do the same thing.

 

[Danse]

Ok, I've experienced 3 more spontaneous reboots in the past 24 hours. The WD drive hasn't disappeared from the BIOS settings any of these last 3 times. Each time I went into the BIOS as it rebooted and checked, and each time it was there and still set as the boot drive. So the main issue now is what can cause spontaneous reboots? My temps look fine. CPU temp is 46C, and the others are lower. My PSU is still pretty new, so it seems unlikely that it's the problem. If there's anything else I should check first, that's what I need to know.

edit: I've noticed that it seems to happen when I try to save a document, but not every time I try to save. I just crashed again, and just like 2 of the previous times, it crashed immediately after I hit the save button on a document. Maybe that helps shed more light on it.

- Kris

 

[Ruger22C]

A bad powersupply can and often does cause random shutdowns. I believe it may also restart, depending on your BIOS setting.

 

[Matt1970]

That is looking like a bad hardrive especially since it seems to do it when you try to save something but do this before you start swapping stuff out and reloading stuff. Reboot your computer and press F8 at startup, use the arrow keys to select the Disable automatic restart on system failure option and then press the Enter key. That way you can see any kind of error messages that may be associated with your problem.

Matt

 

[dbailey]

Random reboots are most likely due to faulty memory. When you save something, it's pulling the document from ram before writing to the hard drive. Download memtest and run that. It's free and can save you hours of headeache.

 

[Danse]

Ok, looks like I'll be testing my HD again and my RAM as well. I wish I had a way to test the PSU too. Thanks for the advice. I'll report back after I get it done.

 

[Danse]

Been running Memtest86+ for a few hours, it's on pass 6 now. Not sure how much longer it will run. It's apparently just running whatever the default set of tests is. Are there any other tests or options in it that I should have it run? If the memory checks out, then that pretty much leaves the hard drive itself as the prime suspect. I've had at least 4 crashes since my last post, one of which resulted in the WD drive disappearing again until after i turned the machine off for a while. When I started it up again after I got home from work, the drive showed up again, so I set it as the boot drive and it booted up fine.

Since I don't know of any way to test my PSU, I think I'm going to RMA the drive. Just gotta back up a bunch of stuff first. I'm gonna burn through a stack of DVDs I think.

edit: on pass 9 now.... still no errors... i'm thinking the memory is probably not the problem...

 

[Fraggable]

Memtest will never stop until you stop it. 9 passes is probably enough to rule memory out. I'm saying it sounds like the hard drive is going out. Next most likely is the PSU, which just isn't easily tested unless you can remove the possibly bad drive and run Windows on the other drive for a while to see if it still happens.

 

[Danse]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
I'm saying it sounds like the hard drive is going out. Next most likely is the PSU, which just isn't easily tested unless you can remove the possibly bad drive and run Windows on the other drive for a while to see if it still happens.

Yeah. I'm gonna start backing stuff up and get the drive ready for RMA. The second drive is never the one that drops out of the boot order, just the WD drive. Since it is my OS drive, that probably explains the spontaneous reboots.