Drive will not boot.....?

[elbirth]

For some reason, one of my computers just will not boot off of it's main harddrive. One day my father was using Photoshop and closed it, and when he did, the machine completely shut down. He rebooted it and it would not boot. I had an old drive just sitting in the case with Windows on it, so I can boot with that drive and still slave the other drive, but the main drive will not boot- it will just go to a black screen and have a cursor blink in the top left corner of the screen.

I've tried rebooting several times, disabling the other drives, even booting with the Windows XP CD into the Recovery Console and running "fixboot" and "fixmbr" but nothing seems to work.

I really don't want to have to reinstall everything on there if at all possible... does anyone have any suggestions at all that I can try that won't lose data off the drive?

 

[Xitar]

Well you said that you can boot from the back up drive with the damaged drive as a slave, right. Can you see the data off that drive in this arrangement? If you can first check the drive for a virus then check the drive for the boot files (don't know what they are). If there isn't a virus then just copy the critical files to the good drive and then format and reinstall windows on the "bad" drive. If this doesn?t work or you can't see the drive it very well may have died and you are SOL.

This is just something I would do. Also make sure you have the jumpers set correctly i.e. slave, master.

GL

 

[elbirth]

correct, I can boot fine off of another harddrive and have the original drive slaved. I can see all the files just fine on the original drive and open them up. I'm running a full system scan as we speak to make sure there are no viruses on the drive.... what are the boot files I should look for?

 

[Xitar]

I think it is just "boot.ini", but not for sure, sorry. I did find this aticle if you wanted some guidance on the repair process. I would google windows boot files and go from there. Sorry I can't be of more help, but these are the steps that I would follow.

 

[Xitar]

This is the content of my boot file in W2K (sorry i'm here at work)

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

hope this helps?