G
Guest
Hi Folks,
I have a system that is getting long in the tooth. It is a Dell Dimension
XPS T700r (P-III 700 MHz). I have been running XP, keeping up with all the
latest service patches, running regular virus checks, spyware checks, etc. I
have four kids ranging from 3 to 11 and they give the system a good workout.
Recently I noticed some very strange behavior that has come to a head and
would greatly appreciate your advice.
The first symptom was that the system had slowed down to a tremendous crawl.
I ran virus checks, spyware checks, and adware checks and came up rather
clean. I defragged my C: drive (a 130 GB Maxtor ATA/133). However, this
evening the system just dragged to the point of needing a hard reboot. This
is where the trouble began.
The system would start booting in the XP. The little blue bars under the XP
logo would scan 5 times, then we would see a quick BSOD and the system would
reboot. I don't recall setting it to auto reboot because I always liked to
look at the messages in days past to try and figure out the root cause of a
problem, but it may indeed be set to auto reboot. Can't tell at this point.
I tried using the install CD to see if I could do some repair. However, I
had to reboot about four or five times to get the installer to come up
cleanly. Each time it died with a different message, sometimes a .sys file,
sometimes an error in a .C file. "Aha!!" I thought, "Bad memory!" So I
pulled out each of my three 256 MB chips and rebooted with only one of them
installed at a time to find the culprit. No such luck. The same behavior
was exhibited all three times.
OK, on to the next. I ran the CD to the recovery mode. However, it didn't
show me the C drive, only the E drive (which is on the original HDD, a Maxtor
80 GB ATA/133). So I swapped the hard drives and made the 80 GB one the
Master. I rebooted into NT 4.0 (thank goodness I am consistent with my
Administrator passwords!) and went to look at the NTFS partion for XP. No
such luck, NT reported I/O error on that drive.
OK, so now I'm thinking "bad NTFS partion" and start looking into it. But,
if it was a bad partition (say a corrupted MBR), then why would XP start
(that is, the loader would load and start executing)? I would expect to see "
If it isn't a bad partition, then why can't NT 4.0 see the NTFS partition --
has there been a change so that NT4.0 can't read the XP formatted NTFS
partion?
What do you experienced folks recommend? Should I try something like Active
Uneraser to try to recover my MBR? I tried to follow MS's knowledge base for
repairing a corrupt registry that is preventing boot up, but remember, the
Recovery Console only showed me the NT40 installation on the E: drive, not
the XP installation on the C: drive.
At this point, I'm starting to think bad motherboard, but I will still need
to get the data off of that NTFS partion, so I don't want to reformat it at
any costs!
I greatly appreciate your time and help.
Petie
I have a system that is getting long in the tooth. It is a Dell Dimension
XPS T700r (P-III 700 MHz). I have been running XP, keeping up with all the
latest service patches, running regular virus checks, spyware checks, etc. I
have four kids ranging from 3 to 11 and they give the system a good workout.
Recently I noticed some very strange behavior that has come to a head and
would greatly appreciate your advice.
The first symptom was that the system had slowed down to a tremendous crawl.
I ran virus checks, spyware checks, and adware checks and came up rather
clean. I defragged my C: drive (a 130 GB Maxtor ATA/133). However, this
evening the system just dragged to the point of needing a hard reboot. This
is where the trouble began.
The system would start booting in the XP. The little blue bars under the XP
logo would scan 5 times, then we would see a quick BSOD and the system would
reboot. I don't recall setting it to auto reboot because I always liked to
look at the messages in days past to try and figure out the root cause of a
problem, but it may indeed be set to auto reboot. Can't tell at this point.
I tried using the install CD to see if I could do some repair. However, I
had to reboot about four or five times to get the installer to come up
cleanly. Each time it died with a different message, sometimes a .sys file,
sometimes an error in a .C file. "Aha!!" I thought, "Bad memory!" So I
pulled out each of my three 256 MB chips and rebooted with only one of them
installed at a time to find the culprit. No such luck. The same behavior
was exhibited all three times.
OK, on to the next. I ran the CD to the recovery mode. However, it didn't
show me the C drive, only the E drive (which is on the original HDD, a Maxtor
80 GB ATA/133). So I swapped the hard drives and made the 80 GB one the
Master. I rebooted into NT 4.0 (thank goodness I am consistent with my
Administrator passwords!) and went to look at the NTFS partion for XP. No
such luck, NT reported I/O error on that drive.
OK, so now I'm thinking "bad NTFS partion" and start looking into it. But,
if it was a bad partition (say a corrupted MBR), then why would XP start
(that is, the loader would load and start executing)? I would expect to see "
If it isn't a bad partition, then why can't NT 4.0 see the NTFS partition --
has there been a change so that NT4.0 can't read the XP formatted NTFS
partion?
What do you experienced folks recommend? Should I try something like Active
Uneraser to try to recover my MBR? I tried to follow MS's knowledge base for
repairing a corrupt registry that is preventing boot up, but remember, the
Recovery Console only showed me the NT40 installation on the E: drive, not
the XP installation on the C: drive.
At this point, I'm starting to think bad motherboard, but I will still need
to get the data off of that NTFS partion, so I don't want to reformat it at
any costs!
I greatly appreciate your time and help.
Petie