Hi. This is a really strange one. Sorry about the length, but there's a lot to digest.
WindowsXP computer with 200Gb HDD and 2 partitions and AMD3500+ and was running well. At startup one day it suddenly started to reboot once it got to the Windows logo. Safe mode etc do not work either. No warning of this coming.
I connected the hard drive to another computer, and in windows explorer I can see and read D drive but attempting to access C drive results in an error which basically says it is unreadable, so I can't scan it for virii etc. D drive is fine and readable. Question - if C is unreadable, how can windows get to the boot logo at startup when the drive is put into its "home" machine??
I used Stellar Phoenix to recover all the files from the C drive, and all were there for recovery (at this time I just did the data as a backup). So the files are there. I used Partition Table Doctor to check the boot partition and rebuild partition tables. I don't think they were bad, but doing this made no difference anyway.
I then put the drive back and tried to reinstall windows from the CD, but, while it finds C drive, it says the format is unknown and wants to reformat the drive. Again, how can this be if windows does in fact start to boot? Could someone have converted the drive to another file system??
Now the crunch. This machine had exactly the same problem 4 months ago. I couldn't fix it back then, and in the end restored a ghost image to get it going again, and it worked perfectly until now.
Does anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this before I again restore the image?
I'm almost certain the problem is not RAM or Video card - I checked that stuff to death last time. Restoring the image resulted in the machine immediately working again.
Thanks
Recommended Answers
Jump to PostSometimes you just have to learn to let go. If I had a good backup of my data I would just toss the pain in the rear hard-drive and get another. Storage is cheap and you don't need the aggravation.
I have seen this problem before normaly from clients …
Jump to Postwhile Vhex has a point, i believe you might have made things worst by doing the restore boot record while the drive was in another PC. what you should have done is use your windows cd to restore the MBR. If you are able to back up the data why …
Jump to PostIt is very early on in the loading that the Windows logo screen [with loading bar] is presented. BIOS has read the MBR code and transferred it into memory; that code then scans the partition table for an active partition and the code in that partition's first sector, the boot …
Jump to PostThis sounds to me like the hard disk has a bad low level format, and while parts of it are working, the area with the Windows kernel is damaged to the point where the kernel will not load.
It needs a complete reformat for low and high level, and …
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