Urgent Help!! XP Pro continually rebooting itself

bigdunc · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:36

My mates pc is running XP Pro but is continually rebooting itself. I have taken his hard drive and set it as a slave drive in my pc. If I try and access it is it asking me to format the drive. If I go into Disk Managment in admin tools>computer management and check the drive it is showing as partition type unknown.

Can anyone tell me what the problem could be?

Cheers

Brian Stuart · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:47

Looks as thoug hthe hard drive itself is foobared. I.ve had this problem a few times on clients PCs. Download one of the manufactures disk checking utilities, copy it onto a floppy and set your pc to boot from floppy first. Then select the drive in question and run a full diagnostic scan. if you are lucky it may be bad sectors that are repairable.
Brian

Dr_Evil · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:51

Maybe the MBR is corrupt? try run the repair option on the XP cd perhaps?

bigdunc · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:52

Sorry I should have said but I have already done that and it passed with flying colours. Could it be that the boot master record is corrupt as it doesn't tell me what file system it is running ie. NTFS?

Cheers

Dr_Evil · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:53

Could be. have you tried FIXMBR in the recovery console?

bigdunc · 9 Feb 2006 at 11:55

Will I lose any of the data if I run the fixmbr command?

Otacon · 9 Feb 2006 at 12:04

There, isn't that a better title. Try and make it more useful in future.

bigdunc · 9 Feb 2006 at 12:08

I consider myself told off