TheTechGuide Forum
General Category => Hardware => Topic started by: Mr_Wonderstuff on November 05, 2001, 05:24:24 AM
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Im looking at a friends pc which oddly refuses to boot from the hard disk when it needs to. I get the message:
\"Loading boot record from IDE 0...OK\". then nothing.
The bios detects the hard disk, I can see the data when booting from a bootdisk and Ive checked it for a boot sector virus and come up with nothing and scandisk cant find anything wrong.
Any help out there?
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Haven\'t seen that particular boot message before (Loading boot record from IDE 0...OK). Is it an older PC? Is the drive using some type of EZ-Bios (used on drives over 8gig to use on older PC\'s). Kinda pulling at straws here without more info, but I\'ll try.
First, I\'ll assume there\'s nothing important on the drive that has to be saved (and if there is, put the drive in a PC that has a CD burner, and save everything that is crucial). Second, if the PC is fairly new (say, a PII/celeron or faster) it shouldn\'t have the 8.4gig drive limitation, so we won\'t worry about anything like EZ-Bios. Take a Windows 98 boot floppy and boot to that. You won\'t need cd-rom support yet. When it\'s done, type \"fdisk\". Go through the menus to delete the partition(s) on that drive. Reboot. Type \"fdisk\" again, this time make a primary partition (answer yes to large disk access, and to making the partition fill up the whole drive). Reboot again. This time type \"format c:\". If it complains about not being able to read something from the drive at first, tell it to ignore (I get this sometimes when formatting a drive that isn\'t already formatted). It\'ll take a while. When done reboot one more time. Type \"sys c:\" at the prompt. Take the floppy out of the PC and reboot. If it boots to a DOS prompt, you\'re good to go. Now you\'re ready to install your OS of choice. If it does not boot to a DOS prompt though, sounds like something\'s messed up on that PC. Take the drive out, put it in a different PC and try booting. If it works...something\'s up with your friend\'s PC. If it doesn\'t work...something\'s up with the drive.
A less drastic way to fix it, assuming you have Win98 on it, is to take a win98 startup floppy, boot to it, and at the prompt type \"sys c:\". Note that the floppy needs to be from the same OS version as what\'s installed on the drive. Since you didn\'t get the \"No operating system found\" error...I kinda doubt that\'s what this is.
If you can try the above. Also realize that the first suggestion will completely wipe everything on the drive, which is why you need to have anything valuable on there backed up. It\'s also the most complete way to troubleshoot the drive itself (short of doing low level formats and the like).
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HAs the pc had any upgrades before it started playing up?