HDD / Partition error? Help needed.

[Oculus]

Hi everyone

My primary HDD stopped booting yesterday, after I had to do a hard reboot 'cause Windows wasn't responding to anything.

The HDD is recognized during boot, but when I reach the stage of the boot-up process where it's supposed to load the OS, it just hangs, doing nothing. I'll get the HDD/IRQ/Et Cetera report on screen, and then just a blinking cursor.

To confirm that it was the HDD and not something else causing the hangup I tried to set my secondary HDD as the first boot disk in BIOS and, as I expected, got the "Missing NTLDR file".

Next thing I booted from the XP CD, thinking I could maybe do a "Repair XP". Turns out my C: drive is there but the partition is "Unknown".

I'm guessing the meta data on the drive somehow got corrupted but I'm not sure if any of those MBR or Boot Sector repair tools will actually do the trick since I don't get an error message like "Missing NTLDR file" , or which tool to use for that matter.

I'll try to do data backup first by putting the HDD in my secondary PC before frecking up and making things worse but I'd really appreciate any help and advice you guys here might have?

Pretty please

 

[g-paw]

When you have it in the other computer, run Windows Disk Repair. Also try running the diagnostic/repair software from the hdd mfg off a floppy. If all else failres, once you back up the data you could also try a full format.