Trying to install Win2000 on harddrive with bad C partition

J

jbclem

I have one hard drive on this computer and it's developed some serious problems. It's an IBM 40 GB hard drive, about 3 years old. There are three partitions:

C: 25GB NTFS
D: 5GB FAT32
E: 10GB NTFS

The D partition is accessible via Dos, and tests good (Spinrite, and other programs). I had Win2000 installed on the C drive, WinXP on the E drive. When I try to start the computer I'm receiving a Disk Read Error, and other testing programs show both C and E drives as bad. I'd like to install Windows 2000 on the good D drive and see if I can recover some data. But when I start up the Win2000 bootable CD, and chose D drive for installation, the next screen tells me that C drive is in an unreadable format and needs to be reformated, and won't go past that point without my reformating the C drive. I'm guessing that the boot partition has to be on C drive and is corrupted, so I can't start up the original OS and I can't install Win2000 on the good partition.

Is there a solution to this problem. Is there a way to install Win2000 (or WinXP) and have the boot partition be on the D drive. I've also run HDD Regenerator (from a floppy disk) and "regenerated"(repaired) all the bad sectors on the entire hard drive, but I still can't boot into an operating system.

Any suggestions?

jc
 
T

Todd H.

jbclem said:
I have one hard drive on this computer and it's developed some serious problems. It's an IBM 40 GB hard drive, about 3 years old. There are three partitions:

C: 25GB NTFS
D: 5GB FAT32
E: 10GB NTFS

The D partition is accessible via Dos, and tests good (Spinrite, and
other programs). I had Win2000 installed on the C drive, WinXP on
the E drive. When I try to start the computer I'm receiving a Disk
Read Error, and other testing programs show both C and E drives as
bad. I'd like to install Windows 2000 on the good D drive and see
if I can recover some data.

This is a futile effort and you're wasting your time with that
installation I'm afraid. Hard disk is dying, and the more you do with
it the more errors you create on the disk that you wish to recover
from.
Any suggestions?

Indeed. This is an excellent job for a bootable Linux live CD. There
are a dizzying array of such CD's known collectively as "Knoppix"
CD's--all are based on the Linux operating system.

Now, assuming you have a functioning computer from which you're
posting that has a CD burner, download an ISO image of the CD and use
your CD recording program's "make disk from image" function with that
ISO to create the bootable CD.

One I'll recommend is System Rescue CD
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page


Todd's Impromptu Mini Howto On recovering Windows files with System Rescue CD
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Concept: once you boot the CD, you can mount the dying drive and its
partitions as read-only and then copy data off of it onto an external
drive (usb hard disk, usb thumb drive, etc).

So, boot the CD. Hopefully your computer is setup to boot from a
CD-ROM. If it's not, play with BIOS settings to make it happen.

At the scary looking initial boot: prompt, just hit enter. You'll see
a bunch of fun text as Knoppix/Linux figures out your hardware and
does generally the right thing.

Next is the keymap selection: prompt. Enter 41 for us english and hit
enter. More fun text goes by.

At last you end up at the hallowed linux bash command prompt, auto
logged in as user root (the adminstator ID of linux). At that prompt,
do these commands. The commands start after the % sign. We're makin a
directory as a mount point, mounting your dead drive to that mount
point changing directories to that mount point and doing the linux
equivalent of "dir" there:


root@sysresccd /root % mkdir /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % cd /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % ls

If you see a directory listing of your c: drive, praise Jesus cus yer
readin that damaged drive with another operating system. Pat self on
back because I don't care how many times you've done it, it just feels
cool.

Okay, we can read your disk, now we need somewhere to copy it to.
Grab your favorite USB drive (external hard disk, flash thumb drive,
whatever). It makes life a lot easier if it's formatted FAT rather
than ntfs.

When you plug it in, look on the screen for some messages. Oh maybe
10 lines worth. If it says

SCSI device sdb: blah blah
sdb: blah
sdb: blah ...

If it says sdb like that, then that's the name the system has given to
your newly inserted usb drive. Its first (and probably only)
partition is gonna be /dev/sdb1. We'll use that in the next commands.
Note that if it says sdc or sdd or whatever, modify that third letter
in the mount command below accordingly.

So let's make a mount point for the external drive, and then mount it
so we have somewhere to copy our data to:

root@sysresccd /root % mkdir /mnt/myusbdrive
root@sysresccd /root % mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/myusbdrive

If you wanna verify your work up to now, the mount command should list
/mnt/myusbdrive and /mnt/myharddisk among its mounted devices. Try
it:

root@sysresccd /root % mount


Now we're ready to do some file copying. Now if you wanna try to copy
the whole stinkin c drive to the external drive and have the space
time and patience, go for it:

root@sysresccd /root % cp -R /mnt/myharddisk/* /mnt/myusbdrive

and wait a long time.

But, I'd recommend being more granular because it is a damaged disk
and the likelihood of encountering errors trying to copy the whole
partition is pretty darned high. So for example, to go after My
Documents, do:

root@sysresccd /root % cp -R /mnt/myharddisk/Documents\ and\ Settings/YOURUSERNAME/My\ Documents /mnt/myusbdrive

And it'll copy your MyDocuments directory over the usbdrive. Notice
the back slashes before the spaces in Windows stupid fiel/directory
names. You need those. and notice that directory delimiters in linux
are forward slashes rather than backslashes. The cp command is the
"copy files" command.

Now, if you wanna poke around the failed disk and look for more
goodies to grab, you'll need to only know the unix commands
cd to change directory,
ls to list directory contents and the
cp command to copy. The -R switch of the cp command says
"recursively copy all stuff under that directory too"
man command to read the documentation on these commands or any other.
e.g. "man ls" will show you all about the ls command.

Welcome to your (perhaps) first Linux experience. Tell em Todd sent ya.

Now, if you run into problems, please don't email me.

I will try to be helpful if you post in this thread in the newsgroup,
however, as time permits. Caveat: I have a relatively fresh baby
human around here, and you, as nice a person as I'm sure you are,
aren't my priority. :)

I hope this helps! Give it a go! There are other ways to skin this
cat such as removing your hard disk and putting it into another
computer, but, that's just not as fun.

Best Regards,
 
T

Todd H.

Welcome to your (perhaps) first Linux experience.

Doh-- forgot to tell you how ot end the session.

root% shutdown -h now

to halt.

root% shutdown -r now

to restart.


Or, alternatively, if you want to leave that box up and running, and
check the usb drive on another computer quickly:

root% umount /mnt/myusbdrive

which unmounts the external drive, after which you can be assured all
the cached writes are complete and that it's safe to unplug it.
 
R

Rod Speed

jbclem said:
I have one hard drive on this computer and it's developed some
serious problems. It's an IBM 40 GB hard drive, about 3 years old.
There are three partitions:
C: 25GB NTFS
D: 5GB FAT32
E: 10GB NTFS
The D partition is accessible via Dos, and tests good (Spinrite,
and other programs). I had Win2000 installed on the C drive,
WinXP on the E drive. When I try to start the computer I'm
receiving a Disk Read Error, and other testing programs show
both C and E drives as bad. I'd like to install Windows 2000
on the good D drive and see if I can recover some data.

Its better to boot a knoppix CD and recover the data that way.
But when I start up the Win2000 bootable CD, and chose D
drive for installation, the next screen tells me that C drive is
in an unreadable format and needs to be reformated, and
won't go past that point without my reformating the C drive.
I'm guessing that the boot partition has to be on C drive and
is corrupted, so I can't start up the original OS and I can't
install Win2000 on the good partition.
Is there a solution to this problem.

Yes, see above.
Is there a way to install Win2000 (or WinXP)
and have the boot partition be on the D drive.

Safer to boot a CD instead. The hard drive may well
be pretty sick and you dont want to write anything to it.
I've also run HDD Regenerator (from a floppy disk) and
"regenerated"(repaired) all the bad sectors on the entire
hard drive, but I still can't boot into an operating system.
Any suggestions?

See above.
 
J

jbclem

What I finally did...installed a new hard drive, then ran the "bad" one as a
slave. When I rebooted, chkdsk ran and spent a lot of time repairing the
"bad" hard drive...but when it was finished the "bad" hard drive was
completely accessible, all files saved (as far as I can tell).

Now I'm really puzzled, after all the dire error messages and inability of
other software to access the two bad partitions, now I've regained access to
everything and it seems to be functioning normally. When I reboot, the
computer boots up with no interference from chkdsk. I'll try running some
programs to see if I can see any SMART failure messages, but as of now I'm
not sure whether to trust this hard drive or not.

jc
 
R

Rod Speed

jbclem said:
What I finally did...installed a new hard drive, then ran
the "bad" one as a slave. When I rebooted, chkdsk
ran and spent a lot of time repairing the "bad" hard drive...

Thats a bit of a dangerous approach, but it looks like it worked this time.
but when it was finished the "bad" hard drive was
completely accessible, all files saved (as far as I can tell).
Now I'm really puzzled, after all the dire error messages and
inability of other software to access the two bad partitions, now
I've regained access to everything and it seems to be functioning
normally. When I reboot, the computer boots up with no interference
from chkdsk. I'll try running some programs to see if I can see
any SMART failure messages,

It would be best to get an Everest SMART report first.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181
but as of now I'm not sure whether to trust this hard drive or not.

The Everest SMART report should help quite a bit with that.
 

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