Hi, i have a problem with my hard drive. One day, my pc got turned of at the wall by accident. Once i turned it on, it would not boot into windows XP anymore. I found that using the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT on the windows XP cd did not fix my problem.

I found that strangley enough, when i left my XP cd in, if i did not press a key to boot from the cd, windows would boot from the HDD. I decided to upgrade the bios of my motherboard however, and now it does not give me to option to not boot from the cd, it does it automatically, so the leave the XP disc in trick does no longer work. Any idea what my problem is? BTW, if it helps, all my data was still on the disc when i botted into windows using the cd trick.

Thanks, Ste

Hi ZZfoxELITE,

You say now your not able to boot from CD, this is because when you updated the BIOS it must of altered some boot sequence settings.

Go to the BIOS and alter the boot sequence settings so that boot from cd is enabled. This way means can boot from CD.

Once done i recommend you back all your data onto a CD/DVD or HDD, depending on amount of data and do a complete format of your system and re install everything.

Hope this helps


Tom

Sorry if i sounded unclear. I can boot from the CD, only instead of asking me to press a key to boot from the cd, it does so automatically. I've tried reinstalling windows xp, i might have a go with mandrake later. Once i reinstalled windows, it was exactly the same ,the boot loader thought there was no windows installation to boot from, and so it did not boot. If my hard drive just completely knackered? if so, at least i can use it for storage, and when i use knoppix (a distro of linux that boots from CD) all my files were still there, which i backed up and then reinstalled windows.

Is my HDD just completely knackered then?

Ste

Hello ZZfoxELITE,

First of all this could be a problem with your Bios. You flashed it and after that you had a problem with no boot options in the bios correct? If so reflash your bios with the old bios you had before!

Next....

Well from what i read you being a Knoppix user u know what you are doing. So i suggest this download a copy of UBCD >>>>http://www.portal.itsallpc.co.uk/mod...op=getit&lid=4

Now Mount the iso this will give you a multitude of disk tools. I suggest you boot up one of the commanders and take all of your files off of the hard drive and save them to cd. IF YOU CAN.

If not boot up one of the windows disks on the UBCD try 98 if you have a fat 32 file system.

Now see if you can access the disk at dos level.

If not prepare for data loss.

Delete all your partitions and drives in Fdisk. make a new drive partion and format it. Then try reinstalling windows on a clean formatted disk not just on a reinstall.

Hope this helps Loz

__________________
Thanks For Using ItsallPCÂÂ! <a href="http://www.itsallpc.co.uk/index.php">Computer Forum</a>