Sonicxtacy02

Thursday afternoon my carputer bluescreened itself into the ntloader not found dos message. I figured a clean format would clear the disk of any issues, so i took the hard drive out of the carputer and added it to my home pc as a slave drive. Using a windows 98 boot disk i fdisked and formatted /s. I put the drive in the carputer again and it wouldnt boot . Well after about 6 hours of fdisk/formatting with either the boot disk or partitionmagic the disk STILL wouldnt boot for itself. I ran the disk through 3 or 4 extensive diagnostic programs and they came up with nothing wrong with the drive. This leads me to 2 scenarios

1. My carputer was attached to the top of my sub box, and someone after 4-5 months of use the magnets finally ate the drive. Well... at least the boot section of the drive.

2. The win098 boot disk im using isnt formatting properly, neither is partitionmagic.

The drive will read/write just fine it just wont boot!

Soo... the secondary drive that was originally in my home pc was officially designated the replacement drive for my carputer. Its already formatted with fat32 so i figured i could use the boot disk sys.com command to transfer the system files to it and that would be all i needed to do. Well after doin that I get the General drive failure message. It can no longer READ the drive . I plug it back in as the secondary and AGAIN it can read/write just fine.

What are the chances that TWO drives that i bought as new have dead boot sectors within 5 MONTHS of purchase. Both of them are under warranty but dammit i want my carputer back!!! Luckily i found a damn good data recovery package that found about 75% of my music and important files off the pc. Anyone have any ideas on where to start first here?

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tejesh83

Have you checked the IDE cables? Even a small nick on the cable can cause HD instability.

dingofarmer

did you setup a new master boot record? Holds all the links to the partition, could be currupt.
at the prompt c:\ type fdisk /mbr.
Do this before you install anything though.

Sonicxtacy02

i tried booting the carputer drive in both my home pc and my carputer. I guess i can try switching the ide cable but i dunno if that is my prob.

Sonicxtacy02

I did NOT try that. I tried to do it via xp repair utility but it didnt seem to do anything just went back to the c prompt. I'll have to try that tonight. Thanks!

BeaverWise

How did it work out?

CdRsKuLL

yeah defo sounds like the MBR.. stick it back in your home system and do what dingofarmer said.. if that dont work, its goes in the bin

Yuriy

Bad RAM could be causing it. I remember getting very frustrated over a similar problem just to find out my RAM was corrupting the registry. Just do a bios check on it and see if it gives you any trouble. Otherwise, try booting from that hard drive on a different system, this will help you identify whether it is a hardware or a software problem.

__________________
00 Saturn SL2, boosted @ 8 psi - CarDomain
Newest install - my quickest ever
My 2nd carputer - b4 I broke the touchscreen
My very first carputer - voted the most ghetto

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Gavc

how can the hdd boot after a format without reinstalling the operating system to boot ?

Enforcer

Make sure when fdisking the partition has been made 'active'

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Sonicxtacy02

ok problem solved. I tried the MBR trick and it didnt work. turns out when i fdisk'd with partitionmagic it made the partition an extended and not a primary. I completely overlooked this when displaying the partition settings. I managed to get xp on. service pack 2 on and so far there has been no more probs. Now i just have to recover about 10% of the mp3's i had on there that getdataback didnt seem to find. Thanks for your help guys!

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