[sunny441]

Hi guys:

Once again I find myself in a very silly situation

I have a custom built PC that is my main work station! It has a SATA hard drive. I had linux installed on there - but recently for want of hard disk space, I decided to get rid of the Linux partition. So I downloaded partition magic and deleted the link partition and then formatted it. However I did not touch the MBR (maybe a mistake!).

However, when i rebooted the computer (which I did just once) the boot manager came up - and i chose windows XP and everything went fine. However as i was doing some work 2 days ago - the computer went dead slow all of a sudden. So I hit the little reset button and then everything went well till the boot manager was supposed to come up - all that came up was a screen full of letters that looked like L 99 99 99 ..... Nothing happens after that!!

I tried to boot from the Windows XP Cd and i went into the BIOS where the hard drive is not even listed!! So I entered the XP recovery console - but it will not proceed anyway cos it says there is no hard drive detected!!

Is my hard disk gone? or do i just need to fix the MBR?? how do i go about this??

Help me out guys!!

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That L 99 99 99 error is a LILO bootloader error. You need to get into the Windows XP recovery console and run fixmbr command. It sounds like you will have to load the SATA drivers to a floppy and hit F6 when prompted before it will recognize your hard drive.

[cmw2010]

That L 99 99 99 error is a LILO bootloader error. You need to get into the Windows XP recovery console and run fixmbr command. It sounds like you will have to load the SATA drivers to a floppy and hit F6 when prompted before it will recognize your hard drive.

[sunny441]

Cheers!
Thats what i thought it might be.Is there anyway i can do that from a USB drive?

[sunny441]

well.. it could be used. but the XP cd will not proceed because I do not have the third party SATA drivers.

So as cmw2010 suggested - i will have to get the SATA drivers and do the recovery!

THanks anyway

[sunny441]

Well guys.. am still stuck here.

I got the SATA drivers. BUt nothing is happening. I think the floppy drive is dead!!

Is there anyway i can proceed to fix my MBR without using the afore mentioned procedure?

Thanks

Sunny