Wnidows XP will NOT boot HD

[hollywoodrey]

Hello,

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200 "Ultra ATA" 320GB HD that has Windows XP SP3 on it and it will NOT boot up at all. It simply keeps rebooting. Even if I run the OS cd to repair, it prompts to reboot. I do get a quick blue screen before every reboot.

I think the issue at hand was installing 2 anti-virus programs at the same time without realizing this. Can this cause a conflict? I thinking this but not sure. I am just not sure why this is happening.

I have a total of 3 HD's all with the same OS from the same cd and the other 2 boot up just fine. Those do not have multiply anti-virus programs installed, lol.

I do not mind completely reformatting this drive but I do have extremely important files that I need to somehow extract before I do any type of reformatting. I have a similar issue with one of the other drives but somehow managed to get it back up and running with the CD installation repair. I don't know why this one is doing this and not allowing me to even run a repair.

This is an IDE drive, like the other 2, and are partictioned all the same. I do run 2 additional SCSI HD's which are all recognized by the other 2 drives. However, when I try booting this HD, it recognizes the SCSI HD's but will not boot up my Windows OS.

Any ideas?

 

[Ijack]

Have you tried Safe Mode? I doubt that two anti-virus programs would cause this, unless one of them has installed a corrupt driver; but even then you should be able to boot in Safe Mode.

If all else fails, just install one of the disks that can boot as primary, make this disk the secondary, copy the files you want to retrieve, and reformat.

 

[hollywoodrey]

I have tried Safe Mode to no avail. It simply reboots again or it HANGS on the driver list for hours. I usually get impatient after 3 hours, lol.

I tried your secondary advice and it locked up and I eventually had to do a repair on the original working HD. If I can somehow get this to open....all I need is one folder that has an entire website I created for a client. I always back up as I go along but this time I was beat to the punch. GRRRRRR!

Usually, at least this works with the other 2 HD's, if I disconnect the master, I can plug in one of the others, and it carries the entire system as it should normally. Reads everything all as normal. I do see on the quick blue screen "Bad Pool Header" before the HD it reboots.

 

[hollywoodrey]

BTW....will SeaToolsDOS222ALL.576 be the route to go?

 

[hollywoodrey]

Have you tried Safe Mode? I doubt that two anti-virus programs would cause this, unless one of them has installed a corrupt driver; but even then you should be able to boot in Safe Mode.

If all else fails, just install one of the disks that can boot as primary, make this disk the secondary, copy the files you want to retrieve, and reformat.

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Hi iJack,

Thanks for the response.

Can you possibly tell me STEP BY STEP exactly what and how I can do what you suggest. Sorry for being naive but I really do want to get this right without losing those documents. Can you advise?

I will call "A" the drive I am currently using and "B" the external HD that will not boot (removed from computer because of this). Please HELP!!!!!

 

[kman1981]

I'm having he same issue with my brothers laptop, nothing seems to be working. All I did was install a windows update, restarted and now and wont load up. It just hangs at the loading screen. If you ever get yours to work, please let me know what you did. Thank you

 

[hang-the-9]

Don't even mess with re-installing anything on the bad drive, as it's probalby a bad drive. Plug it in as a secondary drive in a working system (NOT as a boot drive), and get whatever files you need to off it. With luck your system won't crash if it tries to access the drive. Then toss it. Don't run a checkdisk to see if the drive is good or not, run a full drive scan using either a BIOS utility or a disk check program from a manufacturer.

kman1981, it's not good form to post your issue at the end of other people's threads, either start your own or go through the other posts for a solution. Every issue in this forum is basically only a few things with different names attached. Take a look at all the "formatted a drive need to recover data posts", probably a 1,000 of them in there, all have the same answer.