Operating System hosed

[Tash]

I had a working system - Win XP Pro SP2 - I did something to hose it. When I booted, the Windows logo came up with that thingy moving across like it always does during boot, but only for one second and then it rebooted on its own. Now when I boot the screen comes up saying that the last boot was no good, and gives me options to try SAFE mode, or try with last know good configuration, etc.

So, I tried booting from Win XP Pro SP2 CD to try to do a repair install, but it says it does not see any hard drive on my system.

The drive is SATA. Does anyone have a clue what has happened to my drive? I do have a CD for Partition Magic 8 if that can help fix it so I can reinstall Windows. I would prefer to try to repair the installation if possible, rather than reformat. I also have another Win XP computer that is working.

I would appreciate any help I can get.

 

[BadThad]

Does the BIOS see the hard drive?

 

[Tash]

yes. It shows the model of the hard drive.

I just tried booting up on the Partition Magic CD. It sees the hard drive and says there is an error - something like - "drive invalid dismount". Says to fix it look on the Symantec.com web site. There it says to boot off the Win XP install CD, go to 'R' and do CHKDSK /R (I think it was /R) - anyway I obviously can't do that because the Windows CD doesn't see the hard drive.

 

[BadThad]

Did you try the last known good config?

 

[Tash]

yes - doesn't work.

I hosed this by booting from the Vista beta CD. When the initial screen came up, saying, Do you really want to install? I said no, and it exited.