Posted: 6/14/2013 4:06:05 AM EDT
| Old XP box. Power supply failed. Replaced that, now get this disc boot failure error. I can boot up with a Ubuntu live cd and the hard drives are working and accessible. Looked at the bios and the disc boot order looks correct. Both of the hard drives have XP on them (long story) so I unplugged the main one hoping it would boot from the other one. No joy. When it was working I had set it up as a dual boot with Ubuntu. Not sure if I have a boot able XP disc, i'll look around. I am hoping it is a boot sector problem and fixable, but I don't like how it would not boot from the other HD either. Any hints or suggestions would be much appreciated. |
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Quoted:
Old XP box. Power supply failed. Replaced that, now get this disc boot failure error. I can boot up with a Ubuntu live cd and the hard drives are working and accessible. Looked at the bios and the disc boot order looks correct. Both of the hard drives have XP on them (long story) so I unplugged the main one hoping it would boot from the other one. No joy. When it was working I had set it up as a dual boot with Ubuntu. Not sure if I have a boot able XP disc, i'll look around. I am hoping it is a boot sector problem and fixable, but I don't like how it would not boot from the other HD either. Any hints or suggestions would be much appreciated. Since you are able to access the drives using a live CD, but neither will boot, then this has to be something different than a boot sector issue. Im guessing you tried windows start up repair via XP disc, and that failed? I doubt that 2 discs would both have their boot sectors hurt by a power outage but it is not out of the realm of possibility. |
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If you can find your XP disc, boot to recovery console and run:
fixboot (if you have multiple hard disks in, you may have to specify the disk, ie "fixboot C:") It will rewrite the bootsector on the HD. Once that finishes, run: fixmbr (if you have multiple hard disks in, you may have to specify the disk, ie "fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0") It will rewrite the Master Boot Record on the HD. Once that finishes, run: chkdsk /r And grab a beer or two. This will scan each sector of the HD and look for bad sectors. If it finds any it will attempt to repair. There are five stages, each one takes longer then the previous. EDIT: You can also do this through the Ubuntu Live CD using lilo. I'd be a little more wary about this method than the XP CD. I stole the following from the Internet: From http://www.1earthadventures.com/2010/07/05/malaysia/repair-xp-mbr-ubuntu-live-cd/
Boot from the Live CD and into Ubuntu (it’s option 1, Try Ubuntu Without Making Any Changes to your Computer); Once you’re in the OS, from the menu choose Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal; In the Terminal Window type “sudo apt-get install lilo“, which is a Linux gadget that will fix your woes; It downloaded, then gave me a prompt box which required me to hit enter before it installed Lilo. There were some warnings telling me to do something otherwise the computer might not work. The computer wasn’t working anyway, so I ignored those warnings and… type “sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr“; Done. Reboot. |
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Thanks, I will try this. I have not found a xp boot disc, but I found a old xp hard drive. I can unplug the two upset ones and plug this older one in and it will boot into xp on it. Any idea if I can run those utilities on the upset drives from this spare drive?
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