AMD based system no longer starts

[Guest]

This previously stable system is running Windows XP Pro from a Seagate SATA
disk. On startup all the bios things seem to happen but when it trys to start
Windows, it stops with the disk light on hard. Seagate diagnostics give the
drive a clean bill of health. From the recovery console, chkdsk /r tells me
"the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems."

It would seem my next step is to format the drive and start over or to go
buy another drive on which to install XP and then see if I can recover any
data from the existing drive.

Are the other things I should be trying? fixmbr and fixmbr and fixboot both
tell me they only work on x86 based computers and bootcfg /scan complains of
a possibly corrupt file system.

Any ideas? Much appreciated.

 

[Jon_Hildrum]

The first thing I'd do before anything else is to enter bios and make sure
it is set to boot from the SATA Drive.

 

[Guest]

That it was. ~Steve

The first thing I'd do before anything else is to enter bios and make sure
it is set to boot from the SATA Drive.

--
Jon Hildrum
DTS MVP
(e-mail address removed)
www.hildrum.com

 

[Bill Martin]

Will it boot into safe mode?

It's a long shot, but a similar thing that held me up a loooong time once
was the video drivers not loading properly, and then the whole machine hung
as XP booted and tried to use a non-functioning video mode. The solution
was to turn off all video accelerations and set it for simple VGA mode while
in safe mode, and reboot. Then the machine would at least come alive enough
to track down other problems.

Bill