boot failure

[Greg Chu The Small]

I accidentally delete some registry enteries. And the hard drive got
damaged, even afer I install the OS, it still says "Boot failure"

Any one have a quick way to fix the hard drive?
Thanks!

Greg

 

[KM]

Greg Chu The Small,

Boot to DOS (floppy?) or WinPE (CD-ROM?) and use fdisk/dispart to repartition the drive. Then format it and install OS again.

Hope you did not have important data on the disk.

Also, you can plug the drive into another machine and try to repair it from there (from XP Pro, say).

 

[Greg Chu The Small]

I do not have any way just to clean up the C partition right?
I have the clean the whole drive then partion using diskpart ?!

Thanks!

Greg

Greg Chu The Small,

Boot to DOS (floppy?) or WinPE (CD-ROM?) and use fdisk/dispart to

repartition the drive. Then format it and install OS again.

 

[KM]

Greg Chu The Small,

I don't know what problem you got with your disk so can't tell you if it is enough just to remove the system partition or not.

But I'd do the entire disk clean up to be safe and then start everything from scratch.

 

[George]

You can plug the HD to other computer, and copy the resource out.
And you also can try to copy some key files from other normal XP pro to fix
you system, but it maybe can not work correctly.

 

[Greg Chu The Small]

I found strange things.
If I boot with WinPE Cd, I can use diskpart to see the hard drive.

Or if I start without it, my Dell system just would not even see there is a
hard drive in the system. It says "unknow device". Then I tried on IBM
machine, it does the same.

Or if I install XP Prof on it, it sees hard drive and copy files to it, then
after 1st reboot, it could not see hard drive.

It seems to me that diskpart did something to the hard drive and make it not
recognizable.

I tested several drives (4), and all behaves the same, but if I attach the
drive as the 2nd hard drive to another computer then it recognizs it OK.

Any insight? I think all the hard drive are still good.

I use IBM,WD drives.

Thanks!

Greg

Greg Chu The Small,

I don't know what problem you got with your disk so can't tell you if it

is enough just to remove the system partition or not.

 

[KM]

Greg Chu The Small,

If you wouldn't mention that you installed XP Pro on it, I would think that
you have not marked your partition as active.

Other than that I don't know what could be the failure reason.

Try partitioning you drive using DOS/fdisk and see if it helps anyhow.

KM

 

[Greg Chu The Small]

I used fdisk /mbr to clean up the drive and it is visible now!

I tried XP pro earlier, it was given me the same result.

I think I am going to get WD disk utility to check out the hard drives. May
be my IBM hardware corrupted it.

Or diskpart corrupted the mbr.

No clue what happened to all of my drives.

So may be my RAMDISK image worked a long time ago.

Just my disks all got the same problem.

Thanks for the help!

Greg

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

fdisk /mbr DOES NOT CLEAN DISK.
It just replace boot code in MBR sector nothing more.


Use diskpart.exe
And then clean option

Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Greg Chu The Small,

As Slobodan has already mentioned to you, fdisk /mbr does not clean disk.

If it worked for you, that mean your MBR code had been damaged (changed). You just repaired it (or replaced).