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Mark_88

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My computer sat in a wood shed for three weeks while in transition...but I got it set up and it booted fine...played and copied a few files and shut it down for the night...

When I booted it up last night it would not boot from my C:\ drive...tried several times and kept saying NTOSLDR was missing (or something like that)...was not NTLDR and my recovery disk was useless...tried to check the disk...would not complete...

So I formatted and installed on a different partition...got a fatal error...then I rebooted and it finished installing...booted fine on the new OS...I was able to scan and check the disk from the new OS partition, and then I backed it up from a previously stored bu version...and it worked fine...

I'm stumped...thought I had a major HDD crash, but the drive (40GB fairly new) seems to work OK...

The only thing I did that may have done something was I plugged in my new Verbatim 4GB USB drive, ran the private zone (password protected on Windows) and copied some files onto it from my C:\ drive...seemed to unplug fine, but I received a message stating that the new drive was installed but I needed to reboot...did not reboot...just carried on and then shut it down...

Anybody have any clues as to whether not rebooting after installing the USB key drive might have corrupted something???
 


Mark_88

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Update:

Thought all was well...tried to boot yesterday...same thing...

So...I formatted my C:\ drive and reinstalled...then backed up from my old copy...got my SP4 back but lost a few programs...seems to be OK now...must have been a corrupt boot sector...or maybe a few spiders were in there chewing on my silicone chips...:)
 

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a 40 gig drive tells me you have a older drive. i would think about replacement time. thats not to say i think its going to die. I still have a functional 40 meg ide and another functional 20 meg MFM hard drive. I keep them for really old crap.

But Windows itself can bugger off all by itself. I have a backup machine running windows 2000. which i have discovered is fully capable of repairing windows xp after a Blue screen of death msg from xp.
 

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My laptops a 60 gig which wasnt bad when I bought it in mid 2007 technology moving to fast! Also it would have come with vista but I asked for XP instead
 

Mark_88

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Nhaz said:
a 40 gig drive tells me you have a older drive. i would think about replacement time. thats not to say i think its going to die. I still have a functional 40 meg ide and another functional 20 meg MFM hard drive. I keep them for really old crap.

But Windows itself can bugger off all by itself. I have a backup machine running windows 2000. which i have discovered is fully capable of repairing windows xp after a Blue screen of death msg from xp.
Click to expand...
The drive was not that old...think I bought it new three years ago or less...

It did give me a similar error about two months ago, but I rebooted and it came back up with no problems for another month or so...and that was the only indication of a drive error since I loaded it...

The drive was actually very fragmented and took about twenty minutes to run the defrag, but then it indicated it was fine and rebooted several times...I cleared the multi-boot option (had two copies of 2K installed on different drives because it was set to boot into the first drive which was corrupted...still working fine last night so I think the drive is OK...all other data on the drive was still available, including my backup files...
 
mjonesjr

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The problem is, you had it in a shed that wasn't climate controlled. Rapid temperature changes will destroy a drive faster than you can say shit.
 

Mark_88

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mjonesjr said:
The problem is, you had it in a shed that wasn't climate controlled. Rapid temperature changes will destroy a drive faster than you can say shit.
Click to expand...
Yep, I would attribute that as a very probable cause...I was going to wrap it in a plastic bag and bring it into the house but figured it wasn't too extreme of a change...wrong!
 
barrys

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The plastic bag might not be a good idea since I think it's humid around now in Toronto. Inside is definitely what they're designed for.

I think you mentioned it's a laptop. If so, you should be able to find out what kind of drive is in there either from pre-boot setup screens, Windows System Information or from your laptop vendor's website. Once you get that, go to the HD vendor's website and download their specific diagnostic app for your drive and OS combination.
You usually have to create a bootable disk to run these since it wants to talk to the drive and controller directly instead of through the OS.
But, running that should tell you a lot about the drive's overall health.

The missing NTLDR message is almost always a call for a reformat/reinstall which you did. Spending 20 hours trying to otherwise diagnose it is a lot more time than it takes to reinstall windows. And, if there are some bad sectors on there, then the reformat will mark those as unusable.
 

Mark_88

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barrys said:
The plastic bag might not be a good idea since I think it's humid around now in Toronto. Inside is definitely what they're designed for.

I think you mentioned it's a laptop. If so, you should be able to find out what kind of drive is in there either from pre-boot setup screens, Windows System Information or from your laptop vendor's website. Once you get that, go to the HD vendor's website and download their specific diagnostic app for your drive and OS combination.
You usually have to create a bootable disk to run these since it wants to talk to the drive and controller directly instead of through the OS.
But, running that should tell you a lot about the drive's overall health.

The missing NTLDR message is almost always a call for a reformat/reinstall which you did. Spending 20 hours trying to otherwise diagnose it is a lot more time than it takes to reinstall windows. And, if there are some bad sectors on there, then the reformat will mark those as unusable.
Click to expand...

It's a desktop...but the drive seems to be fine now after the reformat...hopefully...

I haven't had to reformat a win2k install and this was the first...the only other time I had to do it was when I forgot my password and didn't have the password reset tool that I now have...somewhere...but I usually have a backup copy of the OS on a separate partition...for some reason my trust in this OS so far had caused me to think I didn't need it...lesson learned!
 
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