Computer Does not Boot to Harddisk

[sechs]

I'm teleposting this for a friend....

He has a computer that he was updating last night that suddenly refuses to boot from its harddisk.

He was reinstalling the recovery console to the boot drive, since it hadn't been done that since before SP1. After rebooting to test it, the computer hung after the bootable CD check. There are no error messages. Upon successive boots, it continues to do the same.

The computer boots fine from floppies and CDs (he is using Knoppix to test the machine). The boot disk has been checked the the manufacturer's utilities, and there does not appear to be any hardware issues. If he boots to the recovery console from the Win XP CD, it successfully mounts and reads all volumes. Knoppix, however, will not mount any volumes on the boot harddisk (hda1). He has run fixmbr from the recovery console, with no difference.

I'm at a loss as to what's going on. Any ideas as to what is causing this situation, and how it may be fixed?

Thanks!

 

[Ryoga]

In all likelyhood (assuming the BIOS is set up correctly) either the master boot record or the volume boot record to the drive is corrupted. I'm favoring the MBR.

Use the XP CD to boot to the Recovery Console. Run FIXMBR. Reboot and see if that works. If not, go back into the recovery console and run FIXBOOT C: to fix the volume boot record.

Be aware that this can completely bork your partition table (causing you to lose all your partitions), but that generally only happens if you're using a bootloader other than NTLDR or used something other than Windows (either MS fdisk or diskpart) to partition the drive.

If you want to be very safe about it, you can make an NTFS boot floppy. Take a formatted floppy and copy NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI to it. You can get the first two from any old WinXP install, but BOOT.INI is specific to the system. Go into the Recovery Console, go to the root directory of the system drive, and run either MORE BOOT.INI or TYPE BOOT.INI to see the contents of your BOOT.INI file. (If the BOOT.INI file does not exist, then you will need to run FIXBOOT C: to create a new one.)

Here's what my BOOT.INI looks like:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Safe Mode" /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Recovery Console" /cmdcons

If your friend's system HDD is attached as IDE1 Master and the C: drive is the first partition on it, then he should be able to use:

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Note that the "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" part is just a human label and has no meaning to the system.

 

[sechs]

On advice from another forum, he tried swapping the primary and secondary IDE channels, and that appears to have fixed it. Anyone have a clue why?