reinstalling xp - or not

[Comcast news]

I wound up with a corrupted windows install on a SATA drive. since I had a
fairly recent backup I thought I would be ok. unfortunately I was unable to
repair the window installation, or even reinstall it, so I opted for a new
hard drive (non-SATA). I was able to re-install windows on thre new drive,
but after rebooting I found the drive was in fact not bootable, even though
I de-activated the SATA controller. installing the original EIDE 80 GB drive
gives the same result. I can install windows, but after rebooting the drive
is unusable.

any ideas? is there a chance BIOS was affected, perhaps by a virus?


tx,

Phil

 

[Rich Barry]

Phil, can you in the Bios set the hard drive as first boot device? Some
Bios allow you to do a hard drive search and recognition, though in my case
the Bios is five years old.

 

[Comcast news]

well, live and learn. after two years without a floppy drive i decided to
add one in case i needed to flash the bios. THEN I discovered that the boot
sequence did not include HDD-0! perhaps this is what you were referring to.
I may not be totally out of the woods, but at least I don't have to take up
voodoo to solve this now.

thanks,

Phil

 

[Rich Barry]

Sometimes it really is the simple answer.

 

[Phil Obley]

as I was able to boot the new drive and get access to the SATA drive, I can
restore most of the programs and settings from a fairly recent backup, copy
the newer files off the SATA drive and reinstall the one or two new apps
that were added since. peaceacake....