Power Went out and now I cant start up.

[Jon E]

I built a computer and it was running fine, had a bunch of movies
(home) and stuff on it's Seagate 160gig hard drive. Well we had some
bad storms and the power went out while I was at work one night. I
came home and the computer was off. I rebooted and everything seemed
fine. I went to bed and woke up to some thunder later and watched the
power go out yet again. It wasn't storming when I went to bed and I
left my computer on. I got up in the morning and tried to reboot my
computer and now it will not start up. I have it all hooked up to a
nice Monster surge protector, so I don't think the hard drive got
fried, though I am not sure. When I boot up sometimes I get an FDC
Failure, sometimes I get NTLDR error, and sometimes it won't even
recognize the primary hard drive. I got it to boot off my WIN XP disc
and go into setup to try to reinstall XP, but it tells me the drive is
corrupt and it cannot install to that drive. I don't know enough to
repair the installation. Anyone have a links to guides or suggestions
for repairing the drive. I did a diskcheck and it didn't list any bad
sectors. I've looked around on here but can't find anything that
really helps.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Jon

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

If you can't reinstall, you likely can't do a repair install as follows:
NOTE, while a repair install should leave your data files intact, if
something goes wrong during the repair install, you may be forced to start
over and do a clean install of XP. If you don't have your data backed up,
you would lose your data should that eventuality occur.

Assuming your system is set to boot from the CD-ROM drive and you have an
actual XP CD as opposed to a recovery CD, boot with the XP
CD in the drive and perform a repair install as outlined below. If the
system isn't set to boot from the CD or you are not sure, you need to enter
the system's BIOS. When you boot the system, the first screen usually has
instructions that if you wish to enter set press a specific key, when you
see that, do so. Then you will have to navigate to the boot sequence, if
the CD-ROM drive is not first line, set it first in the boot sequence. Save
your settings and exit with the XP CD in the drive. The system will reboot.

When the system boots, a few screens into the process you may see a message
instructing you
to hit any key in order to boot from the CD along with a countdown. When
you see this be sure to
hit a key on the keyboard, if you miss this instruction and the system fails
to boot from the CD, it's too
late, you'll need to reboot and try again.

Once you have pressed a key, setup should begin. You will see a reference
asking if you need to load special drivers and another notice that if you
wish to begin the ASR (Automatic Recovery Console) depress F2. Just let
setup run past all of that. It will continue to load files and drivers.

Then it will bring you to a screen. Eventually, you will come to a screen
with the option to (1) setup Windows or (2) Repair Windows Installation
using the Recovery console. ***The selection you want at this screen is
"Setup Windows,"
NOT "Repair Windows Installation.

The first option, to setup Windows is the one you want and requires you to
press enter. When asked, press F8 to accept the end user agreement. Setup
will then search for previous versions of Windows. Upon finding your
version, it will ask if you wish to Repair your current installation or
install fresh. Press R, that will run a repair installation. From there
on, follow the screens.

Note, in some cases, you won't receive the repair option, only an option to
reinstall. We have discovered that sometimes this is caused by damaged
boot.ini file that can be repaired as follows and also note, in the
instructions, "K" refers to the CD drive in which you have placed the XP CD,
replace that drive letter with the appropriate letter on your system, "K" is
simply an example.

Reboot, this time taking the immediate R option (this is the section I told
you to skip above. In this case, you will need to get to the Recovery
Console to perform the function below), and if the CD letter is say K: give
these commands

COPY K:\i386\ntldr C:
COPY K:\i386\ntdetect.com C:
(two other files needed - just in case)
ATTRIB -H -R -S C:\boot.ini
DEL C:\boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild

Once you've completed this function, reboot and see if you can access XP as
sometimes, the problem is the damaged boot.ini. If you still cannot access
XP, then reboot and re-run the repair install instructions at the beginning
of this message.

If you only have a recovery CD, your options are quite limited. You can
either purchase a retail version of XP which will allow you to perform the
above
among other tools and options it has or you can run your system recovery
routine with the Recovery CD which will likely wipe your drive, deleting all
files but will restore your setup to factory fresh condition.

If you cannot do the above, your next choice would be to try to install XP
to a separate partition on your hard drive. If you don't have an extra
partition, you would need to use third party software such as Partition
Magic, www.powerquest.com to create such a partition. Once installed, you
could then try to copy the data from your old setup to the new one.

If errors are such that you are prevented from even doing that, you need to
have the system checked out. The hard drive isn't the only hardware
vulnerable in an electric storm, the hard drive might be fine but you may
have an issue with the motherboard or some other hardware connected to the
motherboard that is malfunctioning and preventing normal operation.

 

[w_tom]

First determine if it is a hardware problem or a software
problem. If a hardware problem, and you go fixing the
software, then you now have two problems.

You don't say whether filesystem on disk is FAT or NTFS. If
FAT, then a power outage can even delete hard drive files.
The boot rebuild procedure described by Michael Soloman would
be helpful.

Any decent manufacturer provides, for free, comprehensive
diagnostics on their web site. Download and execute those
diagnostics. If your manufacturer is inferior, then you must
download diagnostics from individual component manufacturers
and third party diagnostics. Purpose is to verify hardware is
functional - including hard drive and memory. For that
matter, you don't even know if power supply voltages are
correct - which can also create your symptoms.

You have a Monster surge protector that claims to do what?
It does not claim to protect from the electrical events that
typically damage computers. Read their detailed numerical
specification. Oh. They don't provide such. Damning fact
right there. Big bucks means it is nice?

Effective protection is not located adjacent to the
computer. Effective protector also costs about $1 per
protected appliance. Notice a fundamental difference between
a protector and protection. They are separate devices. You
paid maybe $50 or $70 per appliance and the protector does not
even claim to provide protection? Worse still, an adjacent
protector can even contribute to damage of the adjacent
computer.

Effective 'whole house' protection costs about $1 per
protected appliance. That is a longer term solution. Details
discussed previously in: "Opinions on Surge Protectors?" on 7
Jul 2003 in the newsgroup alt.certification.a-plus at
http://tinyurl.com/l3m9 or
"Power Surge" on 29 Sept 2003 in the newsgroup
alt.comp.hardware at
http://tinyurl.com/p1rk


Back to the short term solution. Disk drive files should
not have been deleted by a power outage if using NTFS. Surge
protector does nothing for damage caused by a power outage -
line voltage too low. Get the disk manufacturer's diagnostics
to learn the disk drive integrity before writing to it. If
your power supply was properly constructed (was bought using
numerical specs rather than dollar specs), then the internal
OVP (forgotten in power supplies that retail below $60 and
dumped into North America) would make disk hardware damage
unlikely. And, of course, that Monster did nothing for you;
but vastly enriched Monster. There is no such thing as a
'nice' Monster product - from a consumers perspective.