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Fixed, System won't boot.

E

elkinm

Platinum Member
I was cleaning the PC room and ended up accidentally disconnecting my primary hard drive.
At the reboot I get the Invalid System disk error.
Fearing the worst I plugged the hard drive into another system and fortunately it runs and all data seems intact and no errors found after scandisk.

So it seems the system simply cannot boot.

How can I restore the boot capability without risking the data and the partition?
This drive is NTFS (my first boot drive and I am less then pleased with it so far) so no boot discs and it has XP SP2 so I don't want to just do a repair install as the best CD I have is SP1.

My first thought is to try Bootfix, or is it fixboot but I don't remember how to use it, and can't find an online guides.

Either way it is most important for me to not loose the partition and data in attempting this repair.

Any good ways or programs to make the disk bootable again without risking the data?

Thank you
 
This is the first real program I found with Google and I tried the trial version.

It tels me that the boot sector has some errors. The problem is that when I try to browse the drive I also get an error suggesting that this program might not do the best repair. All the files on the drive are still accessible so it should be able to browse the partition.
 
Is there any certain way to back up the current partition and boot data so I would not loose disk access if there is a problem.

I am thinking of getting another hard drive and image my current drive to it before attempting a repair. But with 1+ hours for each image I would like to avoid imaging every time.

Thanks again.
 
Boot off of the XP CD and enter the repair console. You can use the fixmbr command to fix the master boot record, and the fixboot command to fix the boot sector.
 
Originally posted by: Markbnj
Boot off of the XP CD and enter the repair console. You can use the fixmbr command to fix the master boot record, and the fixboot command to fix the boot sector.
Click to expand...

Will this actually work? I have read cases online including my own where fixboot made an otherwise bootable drive unbootable with the same error I am getting and even delete the old partition data.

Is there anything else that needs to be done with fixboot and fixmbr to prevent the problems.

Thank
 
I tried doing an image with the Acronis boot CD and it was not working or just to slow. So I plugged both into the original PC thinking it would be faster.

Doing so I noticed that the SATA cable was unplugged at the motherboard. Before I just noticed the drive unplug with Serielle. Anyway, I tried once again to simply plug it in with SATA and wuala, it works.

The strange part is immediately after it failed I unplugged Sirielle and plugged it in with the PATA connector and it still did not work.

I definitely feel like an idiot now. Those SATA cables really are loose.

The strangest part is why did Partition Table Doctor say that the boot sector was corrupted. Is is still corrupted or does the program not work to well.

Thanks everyone.
 
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