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Ongoing boot problems... cont'd.

L

lumen

Senior member
Alright, so when I boot up my computer about 25% of the time it will NOT find my hard drive.
I recently bought a CDRW and the drive will not burn from my hard drive, however it WILL copy a CD from a seperate cd rom. I put a spare HD in and installed windows and nero on it and it buned from my original hard drive with no problems at all from the instance of nero installed on F: (the spare HD). If I take out the spare hard drive, the burner will no longer burn from the original hard drive anymore.

After fooling around with my system trying to figure this all out I decided to try the windows recovery disk and try to repair my master boot record (mbr) when I try to do this, it shows a message warning me that windows has detected that my master boot record is of a different type or is faulty and that if I try to repair it I will possibly lose all data on the partition...

Do does this mean the mbr is the source of both my problems of my system not always detecting my hard drive AND that I can't burn a CD from said hard drive as well? The only other things I can think is that the hard drive is faulty or the mobo is faulty, but as you can see, both under certain circumstances worked just fine.

Any ideas? I'm truly stumped.

I'm not sure if I should just go buy a new hard drive and dump all my data on it, and then try my luck with repairing the current drive or not...
 
Do does this mean the mbr is the source of both my problems of my system not always detecting my hard drive AND that I can't burn a CD from said hard drive as well?
Click to expand...
most likely
I'm not sure if I should just go buy a new hard drive and dump all my data on it,
Click to expand...
very sensible 🙂
 
I'd copy any critical data, such as spreadsheets, etc., to floppies immediately.

Then I'd buy a new HD ASAP and attempt to clone your present HD setup to the new HD with the vendor-supplied utility.

The warning about attempting to repair the MBR shouldn't be ignored. Such attempt will probably result in loss of all data on the present HD.

Hope this helps!
 
"Then I'd buy a new HD ASAP and attempt to clone your present HD setup to the new HD with the vendor-supplied utility."

Wouldn't cloning the drive also copy whatever problem I'm having with my current drive onto the new drive?


I just went and bought a new HD, I'm thinking of just transferring all my media etc onto it and fresh installing windows... I'm sort of thinking it might be the cleanest way to rid myself of this little problem.

Hopefully Windows can repair the mbr on the current drive, if not, RMA buddy!

btw, It's on! Staples; Maxtor 160gig 7200rpm 8mb cache drives $100 after rebates ($135 out the door with Michigan tax)
 
Wouldn't cloning the drive also copy whatever problem I'm having with my current drive onto the new drive?
Click to expand...

Only if its a data problem, which would also help confirm whether this is a hardware or software issue.

Once the system has booted, the mbr has nothing to do with how it works after the initial system load.
If you are still having problems once you get into windows, then rule out the mbr as the source
of the problem - more likely it is a symptom of something else going on.

Have you checked the cables and connection to the primary HD?
Have you run the manufacturers disk check utility to determine if there are any problems with the drive?

 
Have you checked the cables and connection to the primary HD?

Yes, everything seems okay.




Have you run the manufacturers disk check utility to determine if there are any problems with the drive?

That's the odd thing, the utility won't run, once you get to the launch screen (three screens into the program) it boots you back out to A: prompt. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the HD, at least not alone, because as I've said, it definatly DOES work, I've successfully burned things from it from another drive and once booted the only problem I seem to have is not being able to burn from it from the instance of nero on that drive.

What is stumping me is that everytime I try something to test this all out, the arrow points in a different direction as to what the root cause is.
 
Yea, new disk is the safest. Mine would do that a bit till it broke a few months after those symptoms. BTW you can get that Maxtor for like $70 thru Hot Deals I think. Or you can get a 120GB Seagate for like $60 @ Compusa.
 
UPDATE:

Well, got all my data off the old drive and onto the new one, repaired the MBR on the original HD just for kicks and then reformatted the original HD and reinstalled windows on the new HD (partitioned 40gig/120gig) and then setup the original HD to slave and rebooted.... and then...

Windows did NOT find the original HD at all, so that basically means that drive was faulty (btw, anyone know how picky Maxtor is about RMA's and having the original reciepts? Not sure I still have it or not) Who knows if it was the MBR or not, and frankly I don't care because it seems like everything is kosher at the moment, can now burn CD's just fine etc... was just a hassle for the most part.

Now all I have to worry about is Maxtor giving me crap about RMAing the original drive...

Voila!
 
Maxtor used to have the best return policy in the business; but that was a few years ago.
It was a "no questions asked" policy, you gave them a CC #, they ship you a replacement drive
and you would ship back your old drive - you only got charged if you didn't ship bad the bad drive.

(Just checked, they still have that kind of replacement policy in place, but the web site to
create an RMA might be on the fritz).

How old is the drive? Even without a reciept they might honor it based on the ship date for that
model of drive.

You will need to download and run the PowerMax utility to verify the drive is
eligible for RMA.

You're right that it doesn't matter now, but FWIW it could not even be closely related to the MBR
(Master Boot Record) of the drive since you repaired, reformatted, and most importantly... were
not booting from that drive.
 
Originally posted by: CQuinn
Maxtor used to have the best return policy in the business; but that was a few years ago.
It was a "no questions asked" policy, you gave them a CC #, they ship you a replacement drive
and you would ship back your old drive - you only got charged if you didn't ship bad the bad drive.

(Just checked, they still have that kind of replacement policy in place, but the web site to
create an RMA might be on the fritz).

How old is the drive? Even without a reciept they might honor it based on the ship date for that
model of drive.

You will need to download and run the PowerMax utility to verify the drive is
eligible for RMA.

You're right that it doesn't matter now, but FWIW it could not even be closely related to the MBR
(Master Boot Record) of the drive since you repaired, reformatted, and most importantly... were
not booting from that drive.
Click to expand...



The powermax utility will not run on the drive, it will get two screens into the program and then boot you out of it back to DOS. I'd say that's a pretty clear indication no?
I bought this drive in march of this year and it is stamped as being made in Nov. 2002.
 
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