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Mystery: Windows System Failure
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Zach
(1 messages posted)
Hello, fellow techies.
I am an experienced pc technician, but still learning.
I've been able to fix tons of windows problems in the past, and have become rather
skilled with finding the solutions to other people's computer problems, however,
I have my own now, and I can't find out what's going on.
I have a few desktop PCs here at my house that do not have hard drives. I recently
received a few harddrives from the local college computer dept, where some tech
friends of mine had plenty to spare and were moments from throwing them out. They've
all been erased of all data, because they ran school computers, and we had to wipe
everything for safety reasons.
I nabbed a few and brought them home to use in my empty desktops, yet I can't seem
to get them to work right.
I am familiar with installing hard drives, with IDE connections, separating master/slave,
and correctly setting jumpers, etc. All this basic hardware stuff I learned a long
time ago.
Here's my problem:
I have tried and succeeded at installing the hard drives, yet I can't seem to load
windows off of them. For example, I have a Maxtor 42 GB hard drive installed on Primary
IDE Master, with the Master jumper settings on.
When I start my computer, BIOS recognizes the harddrive, but won't boot from it.
Thinking there was an OS or boot problem, I popped in my Win2K Installation CD. First
I tried a win startup disc, and copied the boot info from another working comp I
have. Nothing. Then I tried recovery console, where I did a chkdsk /p. Nothing. Then
I tried rebuilding the boot partition, and I also tried fixing the mbr. Still nothing.
I can load windows through the recovery console, and win2k setup recognizes that
the harddisk has windows installed, because it runs the recovery console and I have
to select it on the disk to open recovery console. In a desperate attempt measure,
I've used recovery console to reformat the whole drive, then did a full and complete
re-installation of windows 200 0 professional. I still have the same boot problem,
after repeating each of these steps many times.
I have also tried using some of the other drives that were given to me by the college.
Am I missing or forgetting something? Is there something that says a harddrive has
to work in only the computer it originated in?
Here's some other odd info:
When I pull the HDD out of the computer and plug it in as a slave drive on my windows
xp computer, it shows up right away in My Computer as formatted, NTFS, and I can
open the folder and save things and look at everything there. But when I try to make
it a master HDD in any computer, even my xp one, nothing loads.
This is the process I get:
1. Power on, bios does the startup tests, etc. Lists RAM, memory speed, processor,
bios version, blah blah.
2. The basic POST statements are written, I get
Keyboard detected, Mouse detected, CDROM detected, and then after a moment or so,
my harddrive pops up too.
3. Then I get the single short beep indicating the startup performance tests were
complete with no errors.
4.
Next, it looks to my BIOS settings, and finds the boot order: first is CDRom, second
is removable devices (incl. floppy) third is harddrive.
When no CD/floppy are in, it will go to a black screen where the cursor in the top
left will flash on and off continuously. All CPU activity stops, and it sits on the
black screen forever until I restart the computer by hand or hit CTRL+ALT+Del.
When the CD is in, it will load that first, and say 'Press any key to load from cd'...
if I do, then the boot is from CD. That works fine. If the CD is in and I don't press
any key, then after a moment, below that text, it will say "read error occured, and
then it will freeze. A few random characters can be seen in weird places on the screen
with bright colored backgrounds. usually it's d, r, and }. The } is usually flashing
at the same rate as the cursor, which again sits continuously. When it freezes like
this, I can't even restart. I have to manually reset, (hold the power in 4 secs).
What am I supposed to do? Obviously if I can load the drive as a slave and see the
file on the disk, I know that the installation CD did it's job. And if it's not the
MBR, the boot sector/partition, and I can't use a startup disk, or recovery console,
then it's a deeper problem. Furthermore, after an inplace upgrade, and then later
a reformat and complete install, it's STILL not working. Fishy!!! I know it's not
a hardware failure, because I can open it in other computers as a slave, but when
I change the jumpers back to configuration on the label for "master", and then move
it into the master slot IDE to use it, it won't load windows!!!!!!!
Someone please help me fix this. Or, if it's not fixable, at least tell me what's
going on if you have any idea.
Pleaseeee.
My specs:
PC1
Windows 2000 Professional
512MB RAM
42GB Maxtor HDD
PC2
Windows XP Professional
2 GB RAM
40GB Maxtor HDD Master
120GB Seagate HDD Slave
I also have installation CDs for windows 95, windows 98, windows 2000, windows 2000
server, windows xp home, and windows xp pro if you think they'd be of any assistance.
Lastly, I've also tried loading my working, dependable HDDs from PC2 into PC1 as
master/slave, and windows xp wouldn't start on that computer either. :( Not that
it would get real far on a lousy 512 MB Ram anyway haha.
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!
Anxious For Results
~Zach
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 | Mystery: Windows System Failure (Zach: Fri, Apr 25, 2008, 1:35 pm) |
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