Hi,
I am trying to resolve an issue with a machine that won't boot into Windows XP Professional. Let me explain how I have got to this point:
- PC was giving regular blue screens (sorry I didn't write them down - indeed it would reboot too quickly!), and sometimes on boot would report no HDD/boot device - abort/retry/fail, that sort of error. Mysteriously the machine would work after a few restarts, so I ignored it for a few days. Yesterday I got more blue error screens and this morning the PC decided to lock up during boot. Strongly suspected imminent HDD failure. Machine approx 5 years old.
- Decided to clone the SATA drive to a spare IDE drive I had available. Used Minitool Partition Wizard to clone the disk by fitting the partitions onto the replacement HDD. Appeared to work OK.
- On rebooting into the IDE HDD, POST OK but blinking single "_" on a black screen in the top left corner straight after POST (jumps down a few lines after a few seconds, but then halts).
- I thought the clone operation had not worked, so I then tried Clonezilla, via their live CD. This appeared to work similarly, but on reboot the same issue was found with the blinking "_" and no indication of windows starting up.
- I decided to give up for the day, thinking that perhaps you couldn't clone from SATA to IDE, but on replugging the original SATA drive back in, I found that this would also now fail to boot, with the blinking "_".
It seems likely that the SATA disk was messed up in one of the first operations - partition resizing for example, although I can't be sure of that of course.
My intended next steps are:
- Run the free Seagate disk checking utility [are there other better free ones worth using instead??] - I appreciate that perhaps this should have been run first, but hindsight is a wonderful thing!
- Use a XP disk to hopefully boot into the recovery console, and then use - in this order:
- chkdsk /r
- fixboot
- fixmbr
- bootcfg /scan
- bootcfg /rebuild (with Yes, MS XP Pro, /fastdetect options)
If all of the above fails then I'll reinstall from scratch on a good disk (the original if deemed OK by the checking utility). Frustrating in terms of time it will take to reinstall everything, but data loss should be minimal so it wouldn't be the end of the world.
If the HDD proves OK, what other likely things could cause the symptoms described above? Antivirus software installed and up to date, so I think unlikely to be a virus. Interestingly this exact same problem occurred about a year ago with exactly the same symptoms. At the time I put it down to a dodgy windows update, but perhaps it is a hardware fault after all? If it is of any interest, there has been a single "critical" windows update on this machine which has been offered for the last month or two and consistently fails. I think it unlikely to be relevant to the problem, but I thought worth mentioning.
Do you think the above approach is reasonable, and would you do anything differently/additional?
Thanks in advance,
David
P.S. I also ran the Memtest tool built into the Clonzilla Live CD, but this ran one pass with no errors, so the RAM seems OK.
I am trying to resolve an issue with a machine that won't boot into Windows XP Professional. Let me explain how I have got to this point:
- PC was giving regular blue screens (sorry I didn't write them down - indeed it would reboot too quickly!), and sometimes on boot would report no HDD/boot device - abort/retry/fail, that sort of error. Mysteriously the machine would work after a few restarts, so I ignored it for a few days. Yesterday I got more blue error screens and this morning the PC decided to lock up during boot. Strongly suspected imminent HDD failure. Machine approx 5 years old.
- Decided to clone the SATA drive to a spare IDE drive I had available. Used Minitool Partition Wizard to clone the disk by fitting the partitions onto the replacement HDD. Appeared to work OK.
- On rebooting into the IDE HDD, POST OK but blinking single "_" on a black screen in the top left corner straight after POST (jumps down a few lines after a few seconds, but then halts).
- I thought the clone operation had not worked, so I then tried Clonezilla, via their live CD. This appeared to work similarly, but on reboot the same issue was found with the blinking "_" and no indication of windows starting up.
- I decided to give up for the day, thinking that perhaps you couldn't clone from SATA to IDE, but on replugging the original SATA drive back in, I found that this would also now fail to boot, with the blinking "_".
It seems likely that the SATA disk was messed up in one of the first operations - partition resizing for example, although I can't be sure of that of course.
My intended next steps are:
- Run the free Seagate disk checking utility [are there other better free ones worth using instead??] - I appreciate that perhaps this should have been run first, but hindsight is a wonderful thing!
- Use a XP disk to hopefully boot into the recovery console, and then use - in this order:
- chkdsk /r
- fixboot
- fixmbr
- bootcfg /scan
- bootcfg /rebuild (with Yes, MS XP Pro, /fastdetect options)
If all of the above fails then I'll reinstall from scratch on a good disk (the original if deemed OK by the checking utility). Frustrating in terms of time it will take to reinstall everything, but data loss should be minimal so it wouldn't be the end of the world.
If the HDD proves OK, what other likely things could cause the symptoms described above? Antivirus software installed and up to date, so I think unlikely to be a virus. Interestingly this exact same problem occurred about a year ago with exactly the same symptoms. At the time I put it down to a dodgy windows update, but perhaps it is a hardware fault after all? If it is of any interest, there has been a single "critical" windows update on this machine which has been offered for the last month or two and consistently fails. I think it unlikely to be relevant to the problem, but I thought worth mentioning.
Do you think the above approach is reasonable, and would you do anything differently/additional?
Thanks in advance,
David
P.S. I also ran the Memtest tool built into the Clonzilla Live CD, but this ran one pass with no errors, so the RAM seems OK.
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