Member Avatar for tryit

Laptop, pentium III, 256, purchased from a business bankruptcy sale. has both xp professional and home os on it. After running fine for approx 3 months, thanks to the support on this site,
It gave me a blue screen stating master_ boot_ volume_ error. Not knowing what to do, I tried to reinstall xp home. Probably my 1st mistake.
Now when i start up, i get the windows screen with the options of entering bios setup or alternate boot device. Cannot see anything wrong with bios set up.
When I try to boot from any device I get " a disk error occurred. press alt control and delete to restart." This puts me in a loop, and restarting gets me back to the same point.

A friend had the same master boot error at work, on xp professional. She tried to get the fix for me, but it was company proprietary. so here I am asking for your help again!
I have a totally functioning desktop with xp home, that I can write cd's on for any downloads to fix the problem.
Knowing nothing about computers, I'd appreciate any and all suggestions on how to get this thing running again.
I should mention that the xp professional is lockdown by an unknown administrator logon. I'll need to do any fixes via the xp home. :sad:

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Short expert summary and a practical, data‑first diagnostic path tailored to the ThinkPad T22 scenario in this thread. The earlier replies from , and correctly cover recovery tools and the possibility of a dead drive; the sequence below prioritizes preserving files and proving whether the fault is hardware or a corrupted boot area before any reinstall is attempted.

First, avoid further write/repair attempts that could make recovery harder. With power removed (AC and battery), remove and reseat the laptop’s 2.5" drive and check BIOS again for a detected model/size or any “disabled” flag (as noted by ). If the BIOS still lists the drive but normal boots fail, boot a tested Live CD (a lightweight Linux rescue/live image) from a known-good burner on the working desktop. If the live environment starts and the drive appears, collect diagnostic data and copy important files off the disk before attempting repairs. Useful commands to run from a rescue shell (on a machine that detects the disk) are:

sudo fdisk -l
sudo smartctl -a /dev/hda
sudo ddrescue /dev/hda /path/to/external/image.img /path/to/rescue.log

(Imaging with ddrescue preserves recoverable data and should be done before any write-based fixes.)

If the drive is not visible in the live environment, remove it and attach it to the desktop using a 2.5" IDE-to-USB adapter or install it as a secondary drive. Run the drive-maker’s diagnostics or a surface test there. If diagnostics show hardware failure, replacement of a 2.5" laptop disk is the practical next step; if the disk is readable, tools such as TestDisk can attempt partition/MBR recovery without reinstalling. Because the Pro partition’s locked admin account cannot block access once the drive is attached to another PC, data recovery is still possible. In short: confirm BIOS recognition, image the disk first if possible, then decide between software repair or hardware replacement.

Recommended Answers

All 37 Replies

Member Avatar for Civilian

Well here is where i would start, pop in an XP pro CD and get to the recovery console, at the console type in chkdsk /f. if that doesnt fix it go back to the recovery console and type fixboot.

Member Avatar for tryit

bought it used. didn't get a xp cd. have an xp home, but when anything is in the disk drive I get an error with a command to reboot. one big circle. I think i need something that will get me into the brains of the darn thing, so i can give it a new command!

Member Avatar for Civilian

it tells you to reboot with anything in the CD drive? go to your bios settings and change the boot order so that CD comes before HDD (i think standard order goes like this FDD, HDD, CD. so just go CD, HDD, FDD)

Member Avatar for tryit

can get into bios and make changes.

when i use boot from command, no mater what I chose, cd, hard drive etc I get
" a disk read error occured. press ctrl+alt+delete to restart" problem is, no matter how many times i do the restart, i get the same " ".

Member Avatar for Civilian

Ok well there is another way to get to the recovery console, boot into your windows home edition as administrator grab your xp cd and hope for the best.


To install the Recovery Console, follow these steps:
Insert the Windows XP CD into the CD-ROM drive.
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type d:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons where d is the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive.
A Windows Setup Dialog Box appears. The Windows Setup Dialog Box describes the Recovery Console option. To confirm the installation, click Yes.
Restart the computer. The next time that you start your computer, "Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" appears on the startup menu.

bring up the recovery console it will prompt you to select the windows boot to repair, go to the broken one (drrr) and run chkdsk /f and or fixboot

good luck!

Member Avatar for tryit

how do I get into the xp home administrator? all I get is the bios option or the the loop to restart, when i boot from another source. . i need to get past the loop of "a disk read error occured. press ctrl+alt+delete to restart" problem . i'm thinking i need a work around, so i can get to the start and run commands ;-).
Otherwise I understand your instructions.

Member Avatar for Civilian

Laptop, pentium III, 256, purchased from a business bankruptcy sale. has both xp professional and home os on it

I have a totally functioning desktop with xp home, that I can write cd's on for any downloads to fix the problem............I'll need to do any fixes via the xp home.

so what i read was you have a laptop with dual boot either XP pro, or XP home, Also to my understanding XP pro wont boot, and we cant boot from any devices I.E. CD or Floppy, AND the XP home boot sector works is this correct?

Member Avatar for tryit

all of your statements are correct, except: as nothing will boot, I'm assuming the xp home sector is non functional as well. When all was working at start up I could chose home or professional. Now all i get is the lovely windows screen, offering a bios or alt. boot device, and no functionality. I've been banging my head on the darn thing.......

Member Avatar for Civilian

ouch, well lets hop into the BIOS and make sure you are running on the fail-safe setup not optimized, Also just to be clear you cant even boot from a floppy?

Member Avatar for tryit

correct, cann't boot from anything.
ok. got the laptop here, in bios set up.
let's walk thru this. failsafe would be locates???

Member Avatar for Civilian

it should be at the main screen it will have a listing of several options on the left there should be load fail-safe settings. If not then you may not have the option in your BIOS. But lets see if we can boot to DOS go here
create the disk, make sure you set to boot off of FDD first

Member Avatar for tryit

urg!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you're gonna love this one,
saved to cd, booted from cd, got (in red) "hard drive not installed. if operating system not found, reinstall hard drive.
Went into hard drive, got operating system not found.

Member Avatar for Civilian

hmmmmmmmm we'll get this working yet. Ok do this for me go into your BIOS and just verify that is has a detected HD post back with if it does or doesn

Member Avatar for DMR

Ouch indeed!

Is the hard drive even being recognized by the BIOS? At the very least, does the BIOS indicate that it sees at least something on the IDE bus?

<Woops- Civilian beat me to it...>

Member Avatar for tryit

remember i'm a newbie. what am i looking for?

Member Avatar for DMR

In the main/general BIOS page, you might see the make/model number of your hard drive and CD-ROM. If not, look in other areas of the setup pages for something mentioning IDE devices. Different BIOSes display different information, so it's hard to tell you exactly where to look.

Member Avatar for tryit

ok. I have the following: bios version and date, embedded controller, cpu type, speed, installed memb, uuid,
along with submenus for config, start and restart, password, date time.

Member Avatar for tryit

on the boot device list, there is an atapi cd rom drivel isted.

Member Avatar for Civilian

Welcome to the Battle DMR

ok thats a start, in that area it should list if there is a HD to boot from is there?

Member Avatar for tryit

yes, hard drive is there, phew!

Member Avatar for tryit

selected hd and got : media test failure chk cable, and operating system not found.

Member Avatar for Civilian

hmmm well since we can boot a dos program from floppy lets try to run the XP install off the floppy drive this install requires 6 floppy disks, otherwise we'll see what DMR has to offer

oooh thats not good for a laptop this isnt a removable HD by chance is it?

Member Avatar for tryit

can i use a cd?

Member Avatar for Civilian

i was under the impression we couldnt get anything to boot off of the CD

Member Avatar for tryit

can't get anything to boot from anywhere! don't know if I have 6 disks, that's why i asked.
It has an internal hd, removable cd, disk and dvd. IBM thinkpad t22

Member Avatar for Civilian

ok, well let set the boot order to CD-rom as the first device, put the xp home in the drive and cross your fingers

we did get the dos disk to boot, but that is running off of itself

Member Avatar for tryit

got windows set up.
something about install raid?
loading files,
set up is starting windows.....
and we wait....................................

Member Avatar for Civilian

thats a good thing keep me posted

Member Avatar for tryit

how long should it take?

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