boot drive crash

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Guest

I'm using XP Pro. The drive IS recognized in the bios but fails to boot.
The messages before boot failure are

Verifying DMI Pool Data . . .

A Disk Read Error Occured

it then asked my to reboot by CTRL, ALT, DELETE

I can boot off a secondary drive and get into DISK MANAGEMENT which shows
the drive as healthy and active. 100% space is free. It is a BASIC drive
and the file system is blank but should read NTFS like the other drive.

The drive sounds fine and appears to spin. There is no noisy grinding.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Aitch
 
Aitch said:
I'm using XP Pro. The drive IS recognized in the bios but fails to boot.
The messages before boot failure are

Verifying DMI Pool Data . . .

A Disk Read Error Occured

it then asked my to reboot by CTRL, ALT, DELETE

I can boot off a secondary drive and get into DISK MANAGEMENT which shows
the drive as healthy and active. 100% space is free. It is a BASIC drive
and the file system is blank but should read NTFS like the other drive.

The drive sounds fine and appears to spin. There is no noisy grinding.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Aitch
Click to expand...

Based on the Disk Management results, whilst this hard drive might be
healthy, it certainly is not being read. A corrupted bios table might
be the culprit, as indicated by the "Verifying DMI Pool Data" message.
Go into Google and do a search using these words. There should be a
raft of sites. Succinctly, the hardware tables in the bios needs to
be re-installed or rebuilt in order for the boot track of this hard
drive to be recognized and read.
 
you could download the diagnostics from the drive manufacturer web site.



(e-mail address removed)



I'm using XP Pro. The drive IS recognized in the bios but fails to boot.
The messages before boot failure are

Verifying DMI Pool Data . . .

A Disk Read Error Occured

it then asked my to reboot by CTRL, ALT, DELETE

I can boot off a secondary drive and get into DISK MANAGEMENT which shows
the drive as healthy and active. 100% space is free. It is a BASIC drive
and the file system is blank but should read NTFS like the other drive.

The drive sounds fine and appears to spin. There is no noisy grinding.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Aitch
 
Further analysis reported a corrupt master file table, and chkdsk aborted
because of this. I there a way to rebuild this MFT w/o losing data? I seem
to remember having a similar problem with a FAT or FAT32 and was able to
bring it back w/o reformatting.
 
Most of the diagnostic test failed. I used SeaTools for my Seagate HD. I'm
getting a corrupt file table error message now.
 
Aitch said:
Further analysis reported a corrupt master file table, and chkdsk aborted
because of this. I there a way to rebuild this MFT w/o losing data? I seem
to remember having a similar problem with a FAT or FAT32 and was able to
bring it back w/o reformatting.
Click to expand...

Before doing anything drastic, check the hard drive in another computer.
A corrupt master file table means nothing in a computer that has turned
up a "verifying DMI pool data" message. That is, the bios table values
for the HD might be incorrect and not the MFT.

But if it is the MFT, one of the possible ways to repair it might be
Spinrite from Gibson Research Corp. Visit www.grc.com and take a look.
 
GHalleck said:
Before doing anything drastic, check the hard drive in another computer.
A corrupt master file table means nothing in a computer that has turned
up a "verifying DMI pool data" message. That is, the bios table values
for the HD might be incorrect and not the MFT.

But if it is the MFT, one of the possible ways to repair it might be
Spinrite from Gibson Research Corp. Visit www.grc.com and take a look.
Click to expand...

OK. A new machine will be up in a week or so. Would reflashing the bios in
the current computer hurt?

I'll shelf this drive rather than reformat. Thanks for the heads up on
Spinrite and Gibson Research.
 
Aitch said:
:




OK. A new machine will be up in a week or so. Would reflashing the bios in
the current computer hurt?

I'll shelf this drive rather than reformat. Thanks for the heads up on
Spinrite and Gibson Research.
Click to expand...

It is a little tricky at resolving this particular issue. Assuming
that the bios has been corrupted, then reflashing it will help. It
has been mentioned that the "verifying DMI pool data" fault can be
attributed to a 1-bit displacement in the bios tables, such as that
caused by a mis-write from the Windows plug-n-play OS. It is for this
reason that many techs will disable the Windows OS setting.

It has been some time since we do not use motherboards with Award
bioses (or their derivatives). Standard precaution is to download
both the original and current revisions of the bios. The bios tables
are cleared via its clearing pins, per bios/motherboard manual. The
flashing is done also per instructions from the same. Configure the
bios to working defaults and also following the caveat about the plug-
n-play OS.

The rationale is that the hard drive once worked in this computer and
therefore its MFT had to have been laid in properly, to a "standard".
The fact that it is not now booting means that the computer cannot
locate the boot track, and this can be due to an inadverant corruption
of the bios.
 
I've just had a similar problem with my core 2 machine with ASUS P5B plus
motherboard.

1st my seagate 80 GB boot drive completely failed, which seagate promptly
replaced, then my power supply died (Enermax 500W),
now my data drive a seagate 500GB (NTFS) is showing a master file table
corrupt, and I get an error along the lines chkdsk is unable to repair,
I thought NTFS kept 2 copies of the MFT so should be able to recover easily!

I am confused by the multiple failures. I have never had a PC component
fail. This machine I built myself, and took care to ensure I was buying what
I thought was good quality equipment throughout, yet getting multiple
failures.

Also intrigued by the fact that everytime I shutdown, after it is powered
down, the PC just reboots itself again a few seconds later, so the only way
to shutdown is to use the "sleep" feature.

would appreciate any advice.

regards
Bruce
 
Multiple drive failures?
This 'can' be caused by an iffy psu - it was the problem on one PC I had
 
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