Re: FN-FORUM: Boot disk failure

date posted 18th February 2004 17:35

[EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:

> 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. :)

Tell him to do it first, so you can install the legit copy on his disk
;)

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

Er, if it's formatted with NTFS you probably don't want to do that ...

It's always possible that his IDE controller has gone paws up, or it
could be any one of a million other things if it has shonky software
on it.

You could always try the disk on the second channel.

Given the history of stability problems it could simply be an utterly
shagged installation, of course.

I'd be tempted to tell him to buy a copy of XP, rip the data off on
another machine, format the crap out of the HDD and try a fresh
install in the dodgy machine.

As an experiment BEFORE doing that see if you can boot the dodgy
machine to a memtest boot CD, which will double-check the boot ability
as well as let you check out the RAM :)

Other than that it's the usual "pull everything, put it back a bit at
a time" routine.

Cheers,

Pete
--
Peter Croft
PC Associates