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won't boot


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#1
mack3762

mack3762

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I have a HP Pavilion 753n a P4 with a 80 gig hard drive and windows xp home. I can not get that hard drive to boot up, I can hear it working but when trying to boot I get this message, "Intel boot agent version 4.1.01, PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable, PXE-MOF Exiting intel boot agent, Boot failure from previous device, Boot failure insert boot disk in "A" and press any key." So then when I did that I get "disk 0 at id 0 on bus 0 atapi Setup cannot access this disk, A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage" any help
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#2
Congo

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Your hard disk is no longer configured to boot, check that the IDE and power cables are not loose or pulled out, but that is not likely.

It could be that a virus or something infected the boot block, or a bad write to the drive corrupted it, or worse case, a dead drive.

When the PC boots up and lists the drives connected in the IDE's, see if the drive is listed, if not, the drive may be dead.

You could take the drive out and slave it onto another PC to see if it can be accessed and possibly recover any data on it. If the drive is still working, then a re-installation of windows will fix it, after a Partitioning and formatting of course.
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#3
mack3762

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Thanks for your reply. It does list the hard drive when it boots, so then I tried to reinstall windows, it went through everything and came to asking where to install, I entered the c drive and it said it had to be formatted. So I let it try and formatt drive c, after a couple minutes it came back with "windows could not formatt this drive". Can you help?
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#4
Congo

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As long as you realise you will lose all data on the drive, You can partition and format.

Before the format option in the WinXP installation, watch carefully for the partitioning options.

re-partitioning the drive might fix the boot sectors etc if that's all that is wrong, and it isn't a physical defect.

You'll have to delete the current partitions and make new ones, or a single one.

I always make at least 2 partitions and keep all my important data on the second partition and set up WinXP on the first one... C: drive.

You will be asked what percentage of disk space to allocate to each partition. 20 - 30mb's is enough for most folks for C: drive, but that's up to you, it's just as safe to cut the drive in half, so you could enter it as a percentage, say 50% and it will create C: drive, then allocate the remaining disk space, 100% of the remainder, to the second partition. You can do it over again if you want to, or if you want to experiment.

If the drive won't partition, then it's dead I would say.

If it does partition ok, setup only allows you to format one partition, ( C: drive please! ), and then loads Windows.

After Windows is up and running you can select the second partition (D: drive usually) in explorer, right click and look for the format option. Formatting can be done in FAT32 or NTFS file system, most use NTFS.
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