Help - PC won't boot

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 00:27

WinXPHome AMD2400 1GB RAM 2x 80GB SATA in RAID0.

I'd been using Acronis Partition Expert 2003 to resize the partitions on this PC and to recover the 8GB that was never partitioned in the first place. That all went fine except to recover the unformatted I needed to create a new partition then move that space elsewhere leaving this J drive of 15MB (yes MB).

So after rebooting agin I went into contol panel system maintainance etc and asked XP first rename one of the logical drives (it had been moved to D so I moved it to V intending to move it back to G when the DVD Rom occupying G relocated on reboot) - it did this no problem...

and to delete the partition J , it said it could not complete the task and now the PC will not boot, not as is, last known good, safe, safe with network safe command propmpt.

If I put the XP disk in the CD rom it seems to be ignored

HELP

MovedGoalPosts · 21-12-2004, 00:55

If your PC will not boot from an XP setup CD, you need to go into the BIOS and check the boot order. By default most PCs look to the HD first.

To enter the BOIS, very shortly after first switching the PC on, press the DEL key. On some PCs especially Dells it might be the F2 key (If the PC starts to try to load windows you are too late).

Be very careful what you change in here as it does upset settings. Simply toggle around with the keyboard arrow cursors until you find the boot order. Moving CD to the top, with HD second will enable a CD boot up. Save that, exit, and the PC will now reboot from CD (if you have one in there).

I do hope you had good backups of your data. That's the risk of playing with any of these utilities, when they don't go to plan.

I don't quite understand why, but I've always had an odd few MB left unuseable however I've partitioned drives.

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 01:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by MovedGoalPosts

If your PC will not boot from an XP setup CD, you need to go into the BIOS and check the boot order. By default most PCs look to the HD first.

To enter the BOIS, very shortly after first switching the PC on, press the DEL key. On some PCs especially Dells it might be the F2 key (If the PC starts to try to load windows you are too late).

Be very careful what you change in here as it does upset settings. Simply toggle around with the keyboard arrow cursors until you find the boot order. Moving CD to the top, with HD second will enable a CD boot up. Save that, exit, and the PC will now reboot from CD (if you have one in there).

I do hope you had good backups of your data. That's the risk of playing with any of these utilities, when they don't go to plan.

I don't quite understand why, but I've always had an odd few MB left unuseable however I've partitioned drives.

Thats the thing the utility didn't muck it up XP did at the end when I asked XP to delete the partition, not the utility. The Utility had resized all three partitions to perfection. I was not too bothered about the few MB unsuable, just wanted to lose this useless 15MB drive, seemed like a good idea at the time.

Found I get a boot from menu if I press escape at the right place, but being as it is a Promise Raid, I need a Floppy disk with the drivers on it.

Hopefully they are on the MOBO CD. Just what I wanted to be doing at this time of night.

ntl customer · 21-12-2004, 01:46

What model is the motherboard and promise raid thing?

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 10:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by ntl customer

What model is the motherboard and promise raid thing?

ASUS A7V8X mobo
Promise Fasttrak 376? That seems to be what I can glean from the drivers on the motherboard CDRom

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 10:55

I'm thinking, if the PC is coming up with this windows error, and in some boot modes getting as far as the XP boot screen with the whirling blue bar, then the HDD is readable. If that is the case then a fresh install of XP should only upset the C drive (primary) and the E, F (logical) will hopefully remain intact?

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 11:56

No one?

poolking · 21-12-2004, 12:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMHarman

I'm thinking, if the PC is coming up with this windows error, and in some boot modes getting as far as the XP boot screen with the whirling blue bar, then the HDD is readable. If that is the case then a fresh install of XP should only upset the C drive (primary) and the E, F (logical) will hopefully remain intact?

It shouldn't affect the other partitions, when you come to re-install, XP should prompt you which partition you want to install it to.

AndrewJ · 21-12-2004, 12:08

What I was thinking.

SMHarman · 21-12-2004, 13:21

It can see the drive 166Gb RAID, but cannot do anything with it.
I've given up and dropped it round to my friendly local PC shop who built it in the first place, see if any disk doctoring can fix it, otherwise a reformat and reinstall.

Strzelecki · 21-12-2004, 22:43

You could have tried the XP recovery console 'fixboot' or 'fixmbr' but you'd still have needed a floppy with the RAID drivers on it, otherwise you could have tried Acronis' other utility, 'Acronis recovery expert'. Just fixed a PC with a similar problem, the primary partition had misteriously deleted itself, managed to recover that but the MBR was corrupt so have to manually edit the sectors (no utitlity seemed to be able to fix it) got the PC back to life with no loss of data at all. It was a pain though, wasn't just a RAID array but was on SATA too, which half the recovery tools can't cope with!

SMHarman · 22-12-2004, 00:32

Thanks I'll suggest that lot to them tomorrow.

SMHarman · 10-01-2005, 10:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Strzelecki

You could have tried the XP recovery console 'fixboot' or 'fixmbr' but you'd still have needed a floppy with the RAID drivers on it, otherwise you could have tried Acronis' other utility, 'Acronis recovery expert'. Just fixed a PC with a similar problem, the primary partition had misteriously deleted itself, managed to recover that but the MBR was corrupt so have to manually edit the sectors (no utitlity seemed to be able to fix it) got the PC back to life with no loss of data at all. It was a pain though, wasn't just a RAID array but was on SATA too, which half the recovery tools can't cope with!

XP recovery console, even when pressing F6 and installing the raid controller cannot see the disk, so FixMbr etc will not work as it cannot find a disk to fix the MBR on.

www.partition-recovery.com pr.exe can see the disk and can see the primary and first logical partition (the two that are more important to me) and says the rest of the drive is not partitioned, if it scans it it finds the 97Mb partition, but cannot see data on it so at the mo I'm not going to tell it to restore this partition.

So I can now see this drive and edit the content. Do I just need to type this lot into the right place on the drive?

http://www.uneraser.com/mbr-damaged.htm or is it more complicated than that?

SMHarman · 10-01-2005, 11:25

I've just had some more thoughts on this. The pr.exe software finds these two partitions, so that means that the MBR of these partitions is OK? Whats stopping Windoze (on C) and Recovery Console from seeing them?

At this point what I think I would like to do is to be able to see these (say from a dos prompt), attach to the home windows file and printer sharing network and copy the two partitions over to another HDD, then reformat the HDD and start again, but I'm struggling to work out how.

SMHarman · 10-01-2005, 23:17

Shameless Bump