OS and everything gone!

[willin]

Ok guys this one has me stumped, I wanted to install a linux OS so I bought myself another hard drive (keep things seperate etc with no problems) after installing the drive I went to boot into windows XP (the old drive), nothing, it got to reconising the dvd drives at boot etc then stopped.
after trying several things I removed the new drive and tried to boot, nothing, so I took it to a local pc store and they said the old drive was blank nothing on it at all! I have tried the windows recovery console and various commands to fix the boot.ini, also with a NTLDR boot disk, all I get is "windows root>\system32\hal.dll is missing please reinstall this file".
Has anyone any advice?
Thanks in advance

 

[willin]

Guys, don't know if anyone can offer any more advice but after running a few diagnostic things with testdisk (8 hours and more) checking on the old drive, the new drive will now not boot up properly into the reistalled xp, booting into the new drive it took three hours last night just to get to the desktop being displayed!
after running one of the file recovery programmes with testdisk on the old drive (before the boot up problem) it recoverd lots of files photos, word docs etc so may be the old drive is ok!!
I have been able to post here using backtrack2, I have no experience of using this at all, I cannot access e-mail, or cant find anything for e-mail in backtrack.
Any help or even a link to a website would be appreciated.

Thanks, Will.

 

[techquest]

With just the old drive in the machine, assuming its being detected by bios, try putting a windows 98 startup floppy in the A drive let it go through its procees and once it has loaded type fdisk. The W98 startup disk has dos on it and the fdisk command will tell you if anything, partition and type, is on that old drive. If there is a partition there and you want to fix it then let me know and I will help you do that.

Reading all this post again it seems you've got yourself running around in circles and its time to stop while you may still have a chance to recover the situation.

 

[willin]

techquest, thanks for the reply, I will post back as soon as I have followed your advice.

 

[techquest]

OK willin but just remember you want to just find out if the partition is there at this point and not do anything else.

So answer yes and yes to first questions about harddrive size and NTFS partitions.

Then option 4. Display Partition Information.

This will tell you if there is anything there.

Let me know once there m8

 

[willin]

techquest, good news and bad! I tried as you said just connecting the old drive, it said "detecting array" left it for over an hour, stayed the same, so I connected both drives, the same as with the old drive, disconnected the old drive so only the new one connected, it booted straight into xp no problems.
can you tell what the problem is?

Thanks.

 

[techquest]

Not exactly sure what is going on at this point but have a few ideas and there are some issues to clarify.

1. Do you have the drives selected as master, slave or cable select?
2. The new drive gets detected ok in bios and boots?
3. The old drive does or does not get detected in bios ok?

Do you have an xp boot disk or w98 boot disk?

Have you tried fdisk /mbr?

1. Old drive only in PC set as master.
2. w98 or xp Boot floppy into A drive and let the system boot.
3. at prompt type fdisk /mbr - Make sure you include the space between k and /.
4. Reboot PC.

This command will repair the master boot record. From all that you have said that is what is damaged on the old disk. Caused when you put linux on the new disk and unbeknown to you.

The other thing that happens is that your old partition, which would have been set as active, could also have been hidden, as you can only have one operating partition on any hd at one time, save that is if you have a dual or multi boot option.

From your last post it is obvious the old hd is corrupted and it seems to think it is part of a raid array configuration.

But if you want to fix this then you have to take it one step at a time. So let me know the answers to the above and what happens when you carry out the fdsik /mbr command.

Maybe we also need to take this off line and go via pm's so it makes it easier to get info back and forth

 

[willin]

Ok I seem to have solved the "detecting array" issue I remembered I had changed the boot sequence in the bios so that the old drive was to boot first, changed it back and that detecting array has stopped.
Can I clear up a point, all I did was fit the new drive into the machine and connect it up to the power supply and the motherboard nothing else! my aim was to create a dual boot system.
I still cant get the old drive to boot from a floppy, I have checked in the bios the floppy is the first boot device, it starts to read from the floppy or should i say the light flickers then stops and says "remove disks or other media. press any key to restart" I have tried it lots of times I get a message
boot from cd
I have tried booting from the xp cd with the old disk only connected and selecting R (repair) I got into the C prompt command but I have very little knowledge of dos commands, one I tried, chkdsk said the volume appeares to contain one or more unrecoverable problems!!
If i dont boot from the cd and re insert the floppy I get
PXE:E61 media test failure (check cable)
PXE:MOF exiting nvidia boot agent
I have checked the floppy it reads files fine, I googled the w98 boot disk and copied to the floppy (TWICE) after formatting, I now cant get the machine to boot with the old drive connected.
so, where to download the boot disk for this numpty

Thanks.

 

[willin]

BTW with both or singular hdd connected the bios detects the drives, the old drive ide is set as master with the jumpers, the new drive is master as well sata with no jumpers but dont you configure this type of drive from the bios.

 

[techquest]

BTW with both or singular hdd connected the bios detects the drives, the old drive ide is set as master with the jumpers, the new drive is master as well sata with no jumpers but dont you configure this type of drive from the bios.

correct me if I'm wrong but this is the 1st time you mentioned sata and yes there are no jumpers to be set on a sata unlike IDE. With sata's though some of them need to be set up via F6 for 3rd party devices.

But from what your saying you had and IDE as master and a sata as master! That's not going to work as the bios will look for the master device and from that it sets up the PC post boot.

 

[techquest]

I know what you said you were trying to do and noted that you were trying to make a dual boot system.

So good on the array.

But you ain't gonna boot the ide off a floppy and you were'nt asked to do that. Likewise off an XP disk.

A w98 boot or xp startup disk are floppies and you put them in the A drive to get PC up and running in DOS. From there using FDISK you can see if the ide, and only the ide drive in the machine at this time, has got any partitions on it. FDISK and option 4 will tell you this. You can then see if the disk has got your old xp op system on it.

Did'nt ask you to do anything re the floppy only check that the bios is set for floppy boot 1st. Put in w98or xp boot disk and start pc bios will load from floppy and will get you to an A promt. fdisk at that time to see if there is anything on that old ide drive.

From your reponses it is quite clear that you are doing all kinds of stuff, none of which you have been asked to do, or will get you to where you want.

If you want to fix it then you have to do as asked or you ain't getting anywhere and I hope you can see that I don't give up easily and am trying to help.

 

[techquest]

I still cant get the old drive to boot from a floppy, I have checked in the bios the floppy is the first boot device, it starts to read from the floppy or should i say the light flickers then stops and says "remove disks or other media. press any key to restart" I have tried it lots of times I get a message
boot from cd
Thanks.

You get the "remove disks or other media" by the way because the bios is not set to seek the floppy 1st it is actualy selecting the HD 1st, sees that there is a floppy, not selected as 1st choice, and therefore cannot find an operating system to boot the hd as the floppy is basicly a DOS disc.

Trust me that is exactly what is happening re that message

 

[willin]

Ok techquest, points taken and apologies to you, I ain't doing anything more unless you say! I eventually have got a windows 98 boot disk, after getting to the A prompt typed fdisk this is the infomation displayed.

partition type Mbyts system usage
C:1 pri dos 41866 fat 16 100%

those are the ones with information below them.

btw thanks for sticking with me.

 

[techquest]

Interesting

C: is your HD but pri dos and fat 16 is old format pre xp and something that you would have had on ms dos 3.0 etc. Windows 95 could be Fat 16 & Fat 32.

So did you have xp on that HD or maybe an upgrade from dos 3.0 or W95 to XP?

Do you know what size that drive is supposed to be?

 

[willin]

The pc is over 2 yrs old, inc this hdd it had xp pre installed, no upgrade, the hdd is 250gb, it was around half full

 

[techquest]

Guess the next thing is what did the guys in the shop do to it? For you to have got what you have stated someone would have to have put the primary dos fat16 partition on the drive. It cannot just appear there.

Where is the rest of the drive gone?

When you do fdisk do you see the rest of the disk as unassigned or as another partition type?

As I said in an earlier post what you could do with using is partition magic 8 or something of that ilk. That way you put PM8 into your cd drive and boot the PC. It then goes into PM and you can read exactly what you've got in the way of partitions on the drive, primary & active, logical or hidden. The issue here is that you can see the entire drive no matter what format and if it has any data on it. You can also test it to see if it has any problems.

 

[wobbly]

I had a similar problem that was fixed.

First, ntfs-3g should be able to use the drive, but it cannot see the drive if it was previously shutdown incorrectly - eg a power off/failure etc.

I had to put it into an external drive enclosure and hang it off an XP machine then run chkdsk to find and correct errors. then a proper "eject removable drive" from XP which leaves the drive in a good ready status.

I actually had to do this a couple of times.

Then, when it is seen by a linux system with ntfs-3g, it should see it no problem.

 

[techquest]

As wobbly says. But run chkdsk /p from recovery console making sure you put the space between k & /

 

[willin]

Ok techquest, but before I do that, I have spoke to the guy in the pc shop, he says that he never used any third party software, he used miniPE, and checked the properties of the disk through my computer.
I see "warning no partitions are set active-disk is not startable unless a partition is set active" when typing fdisk before selecting an option, Ill see what you think about this before trying chkdsk /p from recovery console.

 

[willin]

techquest, option 2 maybe, I ain't doing anything more unless you say.

 

[techquest]

Ok techquest, but before I do that, I have spoke to the guy in the pc shop, he says that he never used any third party software, he used miniPE, and checked the properties of the disk through my computer.
I see "warning no partitions are set active-disk is not startable unless a partition is set active" when typing fdisk before selecting an option, Ill see what you think about this before trying chkdsk /p from recovery console.

Yes m8 and that is my point you do not have an active partition. You have partitions by the sound of it but one of them has to be set as active for the pc to boot. It looks for this partition to know what it is expected to do.

You really could be doing with partition magic 8. With that you can see the partitions and set one of them active. This will not harm any data that is on the disk, if it is still there it will be ok.

So fdisk will have told what partitions are on the disk one of which is primary dos fat16 and a very small partition. What is the other or others?

chkdsk /p wont do any harm by the way. It will look for problems and mount the disk properly. But let's worry about that after.

Don't want you to have any hangups about taking advice from others wilin . All I'm suggesting is that you take this one step at a time.