Hello, oh ones that know more than me.

Might as well start with the specs of my computer.

Windows XP Pro SP2 (updated to... the 10th of August, yesterday)
AMD Athlon x2 3800+
Asus M2N-E
Nvidia 7600 GT
Western Digital Caviar 250gb (sata)
cousins hdd, 120gb Seagate (pata)
Antec TruePower II 550 Watt PSU

A little while ago my cousin was having problems with his hard drive, so I replaced it for him. What was weird is that on my computer the hard drive was working fine, so I thought that later on I would use the drive as a spare drive, just for stuff that I wouldn't mind losing if the hard drive crashed. Yesterday, I saw that hard drive on my floor when I was cleaning my room, and decided I'd put the drive in and format it.

Put it in, everything was fine, checked and there were 2 partitions there, so I installed and opened Norton Partition Magic 8. Told it to delete the two partitions on the disk and make a new partition. It said it needed to restart for it to do that, and so I did. When my computer restarted, at the windows loading screen, at one point the loading bar stopped moving. I didn't think too much of it then, just thought that something was initializing with partition magic, and just left it to go clean the bathroom. A half hour later, I come back in and the computer hasn't moved since then.

I restarted and tried it again, but it does the same thing, and when I go into safe mode, after initializing one of the drivers, it just stops just like before. I popped in my xp cd and went into the recovery console. To try and make this shorter, I tried this and that and did a fixboot, fixmbr and a bootcfg /rebuild, and none of it worked. It ended up that now I can access the information when connected to another computer, and when I'm in the recovery console, as well as the setup disk says that there is a winxp installation there, but when I turn on my computer, it gives me a "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." error. It gives me hope, because at least I know that the contents of my hard drive are still there and working, but the system cannot access the hard drive.

any ideas, other than a backup/reformat or a repair install? I'll take the backup/reformat as a last resort, I really don't like formatting my hard drive, it just takes so freaking long to set everything back up how I like it.


PS: while I was typing this and doing a little research on my own to try and fix it, the mouse on this computer died somehow, I don't think this is my lucky weekend. It sucks because I've got a long weekend this weekend.

edit: actually the disk boot failure message only came after I unplugged the second hard drive, before I pulled out the boot disk. I do not have a partition magic backup disk, I don't have a floppy drive and it wouldn't write it to a flash drive.

If you need any more information, then just ask, I've got nothing better to do until my computer gets fixed.

Repair install.

Mike.

but wont that mess up my registry? I don't have a full registry backup from the last few months.

Now when I type fixboot it says "cannot find the system drive, or the drive specified is not valid". It'll only work when I do fixboot c:.

all I need to do is to make C: the system drive and everything will work again...
hopefully.

Disconnect from power and check your drive cables data & power are fully connected at both ends. If you go into BIOS does it show your original hard drive? If not, your drive is faulty. If showing, boot from CD and see if repair console shows your installation. If not, your filesystem has been corrupted. You could try running drive manufacturers diagnostic.

Mike.

it shows my hard drive, has always shown it. I've been booting from the cd and accessing my hard drive since it messed up, and it shows my installation, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do all the stuff I did, and I checked in the setup and it said that there is the installation there and I can do a repair install.

Yeah, man, I hope you get this fixed. It's ironic that you end up having a problem so similar to mine a week or so later. For everyone not in the know, I ended up reformatting.