Disk boot problems

[Guest]

Some while ago I added 2 new hard disks. These worked fine. On Friday I
updated windows from the Microsoft site. After this I received a "boot
failure" message. I tried to resore using F10 to reboot from the restore
sectore on my hard disk, but this did not work. I restored from CDs that I
had made before. I found out after restarting that it had restored to one of
the new disks, not the original disk. When I realised this I disconnected the
two new disks and then it booted properly, as it was before the problem.
Now, I can only see one of the new disks (the one that was restored to) and
I can only see the other one in device manager - not in diskmgr. There is a
lot of valuable data on the disk (I got two disks so that one was a backup
for the other!).

I believe the windows update changed the disk that the computer was looking
at for the boot sector. This would explain why F10 did not work. The original
disk was always in Port 0. The other two disks may not have been originally
in Port 1 and Port 2 in the right order (middle disk Port 1 and top disk port
2, as per the manual). Any ideas on what I should do next???

 

[DL]

More likely a disk failure.
Use the hd manu checking utility, available free on their web site

 

[Andrew Murray]

Some while ago I added 2 new hard disks. These worked fine. On Friday I
updated windows from the Microsoft site. After this I received a "boot
failure" message. I tried to resore using F10 to reboot from the restore
sectore on my hard disk, but this did not work. I restored from CDs that I
had made before. I found out after restarting that it had restored to one
of
the new disks, not the original disk. When I realised this I disconnected
the
two new disks and then it booted properly, as it was before the problem.
Now, I can only see one of the new disks (the one that was restored to)
and
I can only see the other one in device manager - not in diskmgr. There is
a
lot of valuable data on the disk (I got two disks so that one was a backup
for the other!).

I believe the windows update changed the disk that the computer was
looking
at for the boot sector. This would explain why F10 did not work. The
original
disk was always in Port 0. The other two disks may not have been
originally
in Port 1 and Port 2 in the right order (middle disk Port 1 and top disk
port
2, as per the manual). Any ideas on what I should do next???

Did you set the drives to "master" and "slave" correctly? Check the jumper
switches on the back of the drives.
"master" is the one on the end of the ribbon cable, "slave" is the middle
connector on the cable.

 

[Guest]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
The TestDisk app is GPL free and when XP suddenly viewed my slave drive as
unallocated in disk management, I thought my data was toast. The drive tested
fine and was visible in device manager, bios, but the MBR was somehow zeroed
out ie..corrupted.. I used the TestDisk app and it found the missing
partition info and wrote a new MBR, worked like a charm.. My slave drive is
back up and running and no data loss at all..
Hope it can help..
Cheers..
j;-j