OS Corruption?

[Dudeson]

Hey all. I'll cut to the chase. About 3 days ago i started doing some experimenting with overclock, testing my rigs limits and such when i noticed my case was full of dust and crap. I decided to clean some of it out and part of that process involved taking out the ram. i have 4 sticks of pc3200 and they get pretty hot so i dusted them off good. anywho i put them back in and booted the computer, everything went fine. now the next day i turned it on and before it gets the the dual boot selecter (i hav vista & Xp) it says that there is a problem caused by new hardware/damaged hardware and windows cannot boot and so instead it asks me to insert the system disc and go through the steps 2 repair. Seen as its a home build (that being my mate put it together) i dont have the discs which is no biggy. but i remember something similar hapened to him and in his case it was when he swapped ram, it corupted his OS and screwed his entire computer. Has the same thing happened to me??

Any feedback is great

Cheers, Dudeson

 

[atreyu]

How many hard discs do you have connected to the board?

While cleaning did you change the port allocation of the HDD, this at times causes the problem you are talking about.

 

[Dudeson]

Um i have 2 Rom Drives and 2 hard drives. I dont believe i changed the port allocation to the drive but i do have rather large hands and i probably have bumped somthing i shouldn't have. in any case, if i have, is it reverseable or do i need the Windows discs to fix up the problem?

 

[atreyu]

It is reversible .. you simple have to switch the cables around. I am assuming you have SATA discs. So the cable ends that go to the motherboard, have to be switched. If that also does not work check the following

- Go into the BIOS and check that the hard disks are recognised by the BIOS
- In the BIOS check the BOOT SEQUENCE and ensure that you have correct harddisk placed at number 1 position
- Also ensure that when you are booting there are no CDs/DVDs in teh drive and no USB devices connected (This is to ensure that the system is not trying to boot from the CD drive or USB drive)

Hope this works for you

 

[Dudeson]

Ahh you have given me hope atreyu. yeah they r sata, curse my big hands, theres so many cables and stuff in my case so im pretty sure ive done somthing to one of them. I had a problem about 3 weeks ago where the boot sequence went out of wack because of a power surge but thats all fixed up and all my HDD's are being recognised. il check it this afternoon.

 

[Dudeson]

Unfortunatly nothing seems to have worked. The problem keeps happening, it exactly says....

"Windos failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix this problem:"
1.Insert your windows installer disc and restart
2.Choose youe language settings and then click next
3.Click "repair your computer"

File:\boot\BCD
Status:0x000000f
Info:error occured while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

Im stumped as to whats happened or how to fix it and i need desperate help. Atm im stuck on my 9 year old computer with a K6 400mhz, 184mb ram and 4.7gb HDD. It takes about 5 minutes to switch wed pages!! PLEASE Help me!!

 

[atreyu]

From the error it looks like
1. It can find the BCD file on the disk
OR
2. The BCD file is corrupted.

Point 1 can occur if it is looking at the wrong disk. So Swap the disk in the BOOT SEQUENCE in the BIOS and see if it helps. If it doesnt then it obviously points to point 2

If so then you have no choice but to get a vista DVD and follow the instructions listed here.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/927392/en-us.

You could also look at some these software to recover you BCD file (which seems to have got corrupted)

EasyBCD- http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
VistaBootPRO - http://www.pro-networks.org/vistabootpro/

I havent tried any of these options but found them on the net as recommendation for similar boot issues.

 

[Dudeson]

Thanks champ. i tried the EasyBCD but its a windows installer and as i can get into either of the windows (Xp/vista) i cant run the installation. Because i have 2 OS's does it matter which OS disc i put in to repair it?

Anyway thanks 4 your help aye, it was very generous of you to spare to time. Im taking my computer to a mates place on the weekend for him to fix it up, thanks a bunch.