Hard Drive Boot Failure - Help Please!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Keith C
  • Start date Start date
K

Keith C

I have developed a problem with a hard drive in my
system. I was running:

Master: 80Gb ATA133 Samsung, NTFS, Win XP Home installed
Slave: 20Gb ATA133 Maxtor, NTFS, no OS

But this morning the PC wouldn't boot - BIOS recognised
the hard drive but gave "read-write error" message.
Swapped drives and swapped cables and swapped
master/slave but no change.

Ran Recovery Console but couldn't use chkdsk on the drive
because it couldn't detect it, apparently (no problem
with the other drive - again tried this with both drives
in both configurations of master/slave.)

Installed XP Home on the second disk and successfully
booted from it. The first drive is listed in System but
it does not return information about its partitions. Nor
does it appear in My Computer.

What should I do? Even if I can only get at the drive to
format it again that would be something.

Also, what has caused the problem? I've seen MS KB
article 315403 and suspect that having write caching
enabled might have done it, even though I had installed
Service Pack 1.

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'm having a similar problem. If you had a spare PC
laying around you might want to try to set up the non
working drive as the primary C drive.

I am trying to find some program like 'Drive Magic' that
came with older drives circa 99 that allowed low level
formatting with FAT file system.

Although this is extreme, you might want to reformat the
unrecognizable drive as FAT on an older PC and install an
older version of Windows. Then upgrade it to XP and use
the NTFS function when the upgrade starts to change the
drive to NTFS again.

However, you will lose all info on the drive and it is
quite time consuming, and you still won't know what caused
your problem.
 
you might want to reformat the
unrecognizable drive as FAT on an older PC and install an
older version of Windows. Then upgrade it to XP and use
the NTFS function when the upgrade starts to change the
drive to NTFS again.
Click to expand...

Doesn't that also mean that the master boot record will
remain non-NTFS as well? Will try and give it a shot if I
can commandeer a spare PC, but if there's any way to do
it with my existing set up I'd like to know...
 
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