I'm trying to diagnose a "crashed" system for a friend. IWill XP333 motherboard, Athlon XP 1700+ and a Western Digital 300BB (30GB) hard drive running in CS mode as the only device on IDE channel one. There are two CD-ROM drives on IDE channel two.
When you start up the system (with or without a bootable CD/floppy in the drive), it gets past the POST screen, starts accessing the hard drive (even though in BIOS it's set to try Floppy/CD first) and the screen goes blank except for a single blinking cursor up at the top left. The hard drive access light is on, but there is no disk access ... and it just sits there. All night.
If I jump into BIOS first and turn the drive "off" essentially, the system will boot from the CD-Rom drive. I went to the XP Recovery console and attempted to run fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk and bootcfg. bootcfg complains that there are problems that must be fixed by chkdsk, but chkdsk /r only gets 7% through before freezing up. fixmbr and fixboot both run without problem. After rebooting and reenabling the hard drive, the same thing happens.
So I disable the hard drive again (as far as BIOS is concerned) and boot up to the Western Digital hard drive diagnostic tool. It detects the drive and runs its tests--no problems found.
Things I haven't tried yet: putting the drive in another system, low level formatting the drive or putting the drive on a different IDE channel. I take that back somewhat--I did put the drive in as the master on the secondary channel in a Linux system and was able to access the contents of the drive (XP Home is installed on there). It looks like all the data is present, I just think the boot sector is somehow corrupted but not positive.
I'll try throwing it in another Windows machine soon, but I'm out of time this morning and was just hoping some of you might have some ideas on what's going on before I start hacking away at this thing again.
Thanks in advance!
When you start up the system (with or without a bootable CD/floppy in the drive), it gets past the POST screen, starts accessing the hard drive (even though in BIOS it's set to try Floppy/CD first) and the screen goes blank except for a single blinking cursor up at the top left. The hard drive access light is on, but there is no disk access ... and it just sits there. All night.
If I jump into BIOS first and turn the drive "off" essentially, the system will boot from the CD-Rom drive. I went to the XP Recovery console and attempted to run fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk and bootcfg. bootcfg complains that there are problems that must be fixed by chkdsk, but chkdsk /r only gets 7% through before freezing up. fixmbr and fixboot both run without problem. After rebooting and reenabling the hard drive, the same thing happens.
So I disable the hard drive again (as far as BIOS is concerned) and boot up to the Western Digital hard drive diagnostic tool. It detects the drive and runs its tests--no problems found.
Things I haven't tried yet: putting the drive in another system, low level formatting the drive or putting the drive on a different IDE channel. I take that back somewhat--I did put the drive in as the master on the secondary channel in a Linux system and was able to access the contents of the drive (XP Home is installed on there). It looks like all the data is present, I just think the boot sector is somehow corrupted but not positive.
I'll try throwing it in another Windows machine soon, but I'm out of time this morning and was just hoping some of you might have some ideas on what's going on before I start hacking away at this thing again.
Thanks in advance!
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