Boot & Data issues
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Discussion

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
Hello!

I currently have a rather worrying boot problem. I have an HP MediaCentre m1070uk PC that in controversial HP style was supplied with no recovery or XP disks. It went tits and despite trying to use a set of recovery disks I created (recommended) from within the system, they didn't work and I can't get a set anywhere - no matter how many times I ask or order!

So, I wiped clean and installed a borrowed XP, tried to identify the hardware and find drivers. Got about 80% success with that, although there's still a capture card I can't identify and get drivers for. Anyway, the system was working fine although recently became temperamental on start-up. I did a reinstall of XP and that seemed to improve things again.

Now to the problem: I was wondering if there were errors on the drive, so tried to run 'Error Check' and it said something like it cannot run the check because windows was using something or other, but instead asked if I'd like to schedule the error check for next time PC starts. I clicked yes and went to restart. On shut down I get blue screen and error messages and it starts to 'copy virtual memory to disk' or similar until it counted through to 100 and shut down

On restarting I now get blue screen and error message 'UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME' blah blah...
*** STOP: 0x000000ED (0X81F8C2C0, 0XC0000006, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

Any ideas what has happened here? How do I fix it? Tried reinstalling XP from boot but there are partition issues which prompt a full format - which I obviously don't want to do as I have data I don't want to lose!

Any fixes or at least a way of rescuing all my data first?

Many thanks

Plotloss

67,280 posts

300 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
Its cream crackered.

Whip the disk out and install it as a slave in another machine.

Copy the data over and then flatten it.

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
Ouch!

Not so easy as it's SATA and daft little cables etc. Old machine (ie this one!) only has IDE sockets

Is it all really that bad with no other chance of rescuing data?

I have a new SATA drive and a spare port that I can stick in the HP - but last time I tried that, I was buggered if I could get new drive to respond - system just refused to acknowledge it was there in BIOS... couldn't format or anything!?!?

onomatopoeia

3,526 posts

247 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
You can sometimes fix problems with the boot loader from the recovery console by issuing a chkdsk /r.

Bit of searching and lo, have a read of this http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=29

Plotloss

67,280 posts

300 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
SATA drives can be a nightmare, they often need an external driver loading to be recognised.

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
That seems about right Plotloss - I've just stuck the spare SATA drive in the HP and boot comes up with Master Disk Error. It shows up in BIOS as Maxtor Sabre, but looking into it's detail, it says LBA Mode: Not Supported, Block Mode: Not Supported and so on

I guess that means a third party driver will be needed as you suggest. Any clues how I get that active? No floppy on HP machine



>> Edited by Janitor on Thursday 18th May 15:40

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
onomatopoeia said:
You can sometimes fix problems with the boot loader from the recovery console by issuing a chkdsk /r.

Bit of searching and lo, have a read of this http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=29
I'll look into that now too. Ta!

aldi

9,292 posts

267 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
I'd consider the distinct possibility that the hard disk is fecked. If you do ever get the system running on it again, do a chkdsk /f /r and see what the results say (they'l be in the event log in a 'winlogon' event)

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
Cheers for the advice!

Well, I ran chkdsk - it got to 62% then stopped saying something to the effect of knackered sector

I ran it again and that time it completed after fixing errors

On reboot, win xp ran the originally scheduled error check, did what it had to and here we are! It works... for now!

I've backed up important data now

Where will the winlogon be found?






>> Edited by Janitor on Thursday 18th May 19:18

aldi

9,292 posts

267 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
start/run eventvwr OK

Application log, look for an event of source 'winlogon'. The contents should be the results of the boot-time chkdsk.

If you look in the 'system' log, its allmost certain to be full of 'disk' errors, indicating that you should get your data off that broke-ass disk while you still can...

Janitor

Original Poster:

2,372 posts

249 months

Thursday 18th May 2006
quotequote all
I think you are right... sadly

Luckily I've saved everything thanks to an excellent tip from onomatopoeia above, but I do now need to be looking for a replacement drive

I have a Maxtor Diamond Max 10 Model:6L160M0 160gb SATA drive that I'm buggered if I can get recognised. Any thoughts there? In shows up as a device in BIOS but no detail on block sizes canbe accessed - it knows it's there, but thats it. I've downloaded MaxBlast4 and put on a CD (bootable or not I'm not quite sure) as per Maxtor's instruction, but I just get to No Boot Device available and nothing more can be done

MaxBlast isn't getting the chance to 'stripe' this new drive or anything