Urgent Help Need...No Boot Sector+Incompatible XP Partition+Incorrect HD Capacity

[Shuomaru]

I am having a problem with my Dell Laptop (P-3 500MHZ) running Win XP. Suddenly the laptop won't boot. When I tried to boot, it said

No Boot Sector on Hard Disk

so I tried to use bootcfg, fixboot and recovery console which didnt work. I tried to boot from Win XP disk to install the new copy which works for most case, however the machince shows only one partition (C) of 8GB. In fact I have three partition and no partition is 8MB in size. My hard drive is Toshiba MK-4019GAXB (40GB,5400rpm). Anyway I tried to format the partion that shows 8GB, the massage said

The disk does not contain Windows XP Compatible partition

So I tried to boot and format with Win 2K installation disk instead - same result - Incompatible partition.

I also have original Fujitsu Hard Drive (12GB) so I swapped the drive, I was able to use the machine for 10 minute before it suddenly shutted itself down and the situation was the same (No Boot Sector Found), also couldn't format due to non compatible partition.

The weird thing is the machine only detected one partition (C) of 8MB which is impossible since it is the same size as it show on Toshiba Hard Drive, and none of the partition on both of my Hard Drives is 8GB (It shows exactly 7808MB for both case)

Does anyone know what's wrong with my Laptop? It seems that the Hard Drives are not the problem. I tried to check the Bios but nothing useful there.

 

[MrChad]

Why did you cross-post this? You have some responses to your original thread in Operating Systems.

 

[Shuomaru]

My laptop has crashed for a few days now. I am new here so I am not sure which forum is the right one to post. I need an urgent advise and there is only 1-2 replies to my post after 2 days.

 

[Grimmett]

Thats very odd. It can't be the harddrives causing the problem. One thing you might try is resetting your bios back to defaults or even updating the bios. It shouldn't need it if your hardware didn't change though. All that leaves is a faulty motherboard or a bad bios setting really.