Problem With Large Hard Drive

[Kertis Henderson]

Hello,

Hardware is Dell Inspiron 9300, Windows XP MCE + SP2. I installed a
250GB WD hard drive in January 2008, and removed the existing 80GB
drive. The new drive is IDE, as this seems to have been the last
Inspiron made without SATA. The following story has happened three
times since January.

I booted the WD Data Lifeguard Tools CD 11.2 and created a partition
of size 250GB. I booted Dell's XP CD and installed XP without
incident. The computer runs fine for a while. After some time, the
computer boots to an empty text screen with a cursor in the upper-left
corner. This is right after POST and before anything Windows-related
happens. So, F8 doesn't work, safe mode doesn't work, and there's no
Windows logo. The only thing that I could think of that worked was to
delete the partition and recreate it.

The first two times that this happened, it was after about 2 months of
using the computer. Everything worked very well in that time. I
can't think of anything that happened out of the ordinary on the days
when the computer stopped booting.

The third time, I did a few things slightly differently. I installed
CentOS (and a swap partition) on two other partitions. I installed
GRUB as well, thinking that this might help diagnose the problem. It
turns out that XP stopped booting after less than a month. GRUB works
fine, and I can boot into CentOS without problem. When I try to boot
into XP, it shows the "rootnoverify" and "chainloader" lines on the
screen, and then nothing more.

Here's a list of things that I've tried, in no particular order:

I ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT from the XP recovery console. This removed
GRUB, but it didn't boot into Windows. I reinstalled GRUB after this.

I ran chkdsk from XP recovery console.

I checked the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files. They match the files on
the XP install CD.

Interestingly, I can read the files from the XP partition in CentOS.
I've been able to back up my files *after* the boot problems each
time.

Anyone have any ideas? I appreciate the help.

- Kert

 

[GHalleck]

Hello,

Hardware is Dell Inspiron 9300, Windows XP MCE + SP2. I installed a
250GB WD hard drive in January 2008, and removed the existing 80GB
drive. The new drive is IDE, as this seems to have been the last
Inspiron made without SATA. The following story has happened three
times since January.

I booted the WD Data Lifeguard Tools CD 11.2 and created a partition
of size 250GB. I booted Dell's XP CD and installed XP without
incident. The computer runs fine for a while. After some time, the
computer boots to an empty text screen with a cursor in the upper-left
corner. This is right after POST and before anything Windows-related
happens. So, F8 doesn't work, safe mode doesn't work, and there's no
Windows logo. The only thing that I could think of that worked was to
delete the partition and recreate it.

The first two times that this happened, it was after about 2 months of
using the computer. Everything worked very well in that time. I
can't think of anything that happened out of the ordinary on the days
when the computer stopped booting.

The third time, I did a few things slightly differently. I installed
CentOS (and a swap partition) on two other partitions. I installed
GRUB as well, thinking that this might help diagnose the problem. It
turns out that XP stopped booting after less than a month. GRUB works
fine, and I can boot into CentOS without problem. When I try to boot
into XP, it shows the "rootnoverify" and "chainloader" lines on the
screen, and then nothing more.

Here's a list of things that I've tried, in no particular order:

I ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT from the XP recovery console. This removed
GRUB, but it didn't boot into Windows. I reinstalled GRUB after this.

I ran chkdsk from XP recovery console.

I checked the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files. They match the files on
the XP install CD.

Interestingly, I can read the files from the XP partition in CentOS.
I've been able to back up my files *after* the boot problems each
time.

Anyone have any ideas? I appreciate the help.

- Kert

Dell is known to be somewhat proprietary in the computers it builds.
The first thing to have checked was whether or not there was a bios
update for the computer that will physically identify and allow the
use of large hard drives. If exists, then the bios setup would need
to be configured accordingly, such as Autodetect hard drives and LBA,
to accomodate the new HD. What might have happened earlier on is that
the boot sector on the hard drive was no longer being seen by the bios,
resulting in the empty black screen. Get the Dell bios update for the
computer, any other updates to bring the computer to date and start
from scratch.