Failure during repair instalation

[BrendanK]

Ok, my brother is curently using an old computer that was once my father's.
It's been running windows XP SP2 for some time. Thing is, this morning it
suddenly stopped working and on rebooting couldn't find the copy of windows
on the hard drive.

I tried using the windows disk to do a repair instilation of Windows, but
the option wasn't available. Then I used the recovery console to try
repairing the bootdata, it neither fixed the problem, nor made the Repair
instilation available. At this point, I picked up a replacement hard drive
and tried reinstalling Windows on it with the system disks (The computer was
a build).

Initially there was some problems due to the KVM switch my brother was
routing his keyboard through, but plugging the keyboard directly into the
system fixed that problem and let me set windows to install on the new drive.
It formatted the drive, went through the full install bit, rebooted with the
mention that it would continue the instilation on rebooting, but instead it
booted from the disk and started over. Pulling the windows disk from the
optical drive and rebooting brought up a message that the system couldn't
find a boot device.

Anyways, I loaded the old hard drive into an external drive enclosure, and
read it without troubles.

Any thoughts on where I might look to identify the problem so I can fix it?

 

[DL]

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

 

[BrendanK]

Hmm ... No, that's prety much exactly what I tried. The snag arose at step
15. I tried this several times. One time the system hung at the Press any
key to reboot screen, and trying to reboot with the CD removed simply
resulted in a message that the system couldn't boot at all. Another time the
system simply went right into the CD bootup.

 

[Stephen]

erase the hard drive again and do the installation again, but this time when
it reboots, don't press anything. also, be sure that you don't need any third
party raid drivers. you can find this out by going to the motherboard
manufacturer website and looking up the drivers on the board. the motherboard
model should be on the motherboard itself.

 

[Stephen]

you should also check your motherboard for any swollen capacitors (rounded
tops). if they are, your motherboard is going bad... contact the manufacturer.

 

[BrendanK]

Did this already. And the thing is, the drive is an EIDE so raid drivers
shouldn't be a factor at all. The more I look, the more I'm seeing the
problem is that while the motherboard can see and read/write to the Hard
Drive, for some reason it refuses to boot from it - Which would make this not
so much a Windows install problem as a Bios problem. Hmm...

Ok, this time I went into the bios, checked the setting for the Primary
master (Which was disabled) and switched it to auto. The bios searched and
found the drive, then I did a save and close. This time on rebooting the
system took about thirty seconds looking for the Primary master, and then
went into the standard boot procedure. I'm currently trying the windows
install one more time, hopefully this time will work. If not, I'll be
needing to investigate bios repair options. And joy of joy's, the system is
the one where a year and half after replacing the motherboard, I discovered
that the motherboard's floppy connection doesn't work.

Well, we'll see.