[PresMatt]

I was playing call of duty when my os crashed. The desktop was shown but unresponsive so I did a hard reboot. After It ran through the RAM check and other preboot diagnostics I got the (error loading os) error. I tried running fixboot off the window recovery console with no luck. I also confirmed that all drives were working, both by navigating through them using the directory command in the recovery console and by checking their status in the BIOS. What I find strange is on boot it shows 2 drives as master and 2 drives as slaves which shouldn't matter since my drives are SATA. It got me to thinking and I noticed in recovery console that the system thinks the windows installation is on my F drive when in actuality it is on my C drive! I confirm this in recovery console by using the directory command to navigate both C and F drive. Everything on my C drive appears on F and vice versa! I also verfied this by trying a new windows installation and it showed my hard drive names associated with the inncorrect drive letter. The only thing I can think of is that somehow when I hard rebooted it somehow lost track of drive letters and swapped them. Also I didn't try the fixMBR command and recovery console because I got a caution message saying I have a non standard or invalid master boot record and it may render my hard drive inaccessible. Any help fixing this would be greatly appreciated, however I would love to aviod formatting either drive.


Thanks in advance,

-Matt

[Advertisements]

Howszit PresMatt?

Enter your motherboard CMOS and find where you assign your boot order. Hopefully you know which drive is which, (my system has 3 seagate SATA's that are all the same size so my CMOS reports them with the same drive name). If you choose the correct one, your system should then boot again normally.

How did this happen? Power surge may have reset your CMOS settings. Sometimes the CMOS battery fails and your MB will revert back to its factory settings. If your system is getting on in years, you may want to change that battery out.

Hope this helps and Merry Christmas...

[Mark D]

Howszit PresMatt?

Enter your motherboard CMOS and find where you assign your boot order. Hopefully you know which drive is which, (my system has 3 seagate SATA's that are all the same size so my CMOS reports them with the same drive name). If you choose the correct one, your system should then boot again normally.

How did this happen? Power surge may have reset your CMOS settings. Sometimes the CMOS battery fails and your MB will revert back to its factory settings. If your system is getting on in years, you may want to change that battery out.

Hope this helps and Merry Christmas...

[PresMatt]

I know which drive is which in the CMOS I can't find a way to change the drive boot order and even then Im not sure that would fix the problem since it's looking for windows on the wrong drive. It would still be looking at F drive when it tried to boot windows. In the bio setting I can change what boots first but not which hardrive boots first. I can change the periehereal meaning hardrive or floppy drive or LAN but not which drive letter boots first.Any additional help would be greatly appreciated, and if theres some trick to changing the boot order in CMOS let me know!

Thanks and have a Merry Christmas also!
-Matt

[Mark D]

What is your motherboard? If you can tell me that I maybe able to direct you further. Sometimes the boot order settings are a bit hidden. I also had a case on an older system where it recognized drives as they were attached, ( Its primary drive had its power cable come a bit loose so the system assumed that its data drive was the primary. I had to plug in one drive at a time to get the boot order correct, as the CMOS had no setting for boot order).

By the way, If your system boots from "drive F", it would become Drive C. CMOS controls what drive the system boots from and that will assign the correct drive letter to it. Your data drives can have their drive letters assignment put back to normal in the computer management control panel, (under Admin tools control panel icon), once you're booting up normally with everything connected.

Just as a test, if you know which drive is which, try to disconnect all but your primary C drive. Your XP should then start ok, but you would not have access to your data drives, (obviously)...

Hope this helps...

[PresMatt]

Sometimes the simplest solution is the right solution. I disconnected all but the C: drive as you said and everything booted up fine. After that I connected the other drives and shut the system down, powered it back up, and everything was assigned as it should be. As for what could cause something like that, I have no idea but at least if it ever happens again I'll know how to fix it quickly!

Thanks a ton, I really do appreciate all your time and help!
Matt

[Mark D]

Glad to help out. Enjoy playing Call of Duty and don't eat too much over the holidays!

Cheers...