FN-FORUM: Boot disk failure

date posted 18th February 2004 16:31

I have a friend that has suddenly received a boot disk failure error
on booting up his machine. Although previously the machine would
randomly reset once every few days or sometimes a couple of times
a day.

I've had the machine here over the weekend to check out and I can't
get it back up.

It freezes on the post screen that lists the irqs and sits there for a
minute
before displaying the boot disk failure error.

Tried booting directly from the xp cd by setting boot from cd in the bios
but with no change it sticks at the same screen and produces the same
error message.

Finally got somewhere when I dug up an old win98 boot disk although
it seems to try the disk first, it wines away, stops for a minute then
goes back into it to boot.

Once in dos I can get into the xp cd and attempt to run recovery.
But on running winnt.exe it starts copying files, listing them as it
does so, after a minute it no longer lists them but the message
stays stating it's copying files. Left it for at least 1/2 hr over the
weekend at this point with no change, the cd wineing away the whole time.

I've taken the hd out the machine and plugged it into another,
all the data is still there, checked for errors, defragged, ran virus
scan, adaware and plugged it back in the dody machine with
no change.

The only obvious thing I haven't tried is download the xp floppy boot
disks.
Mainly because it seems such hassle and I have no floppies.
Plus I'm not sure it will make much difference.

One final point that could be the root of the whole problem.
It's a dodgy copy of xp pro with no patches installed.

I emailed a few friends and clients about the recent critical
update last week and my mate tried to update but got a piracy
message. His system died a day later, although it has had
the random reset problem for about a month he says.
God knows what other dodgy software he's got running on it.

So any ideas anybody? Is it worth the hassle of trying the xp
boot floppies? The guy is panic stricken and promises to go
buy a legit copy of xp as soon as his baby is working again. :)

Would rewriting the mbr work? Can I do that whilst it's plugged
into another machine?

Sigh... I could do without this.

Any help gratefully received.

regards,

Darren Yates
[EMAIL REMOVED]
http://dittodesign.co.uk
http://www.how-to-make-money-online.info