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Help...computer crashed


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#1
Jehinkle

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I have a problem with my computer. While I was playing a game, the game closed, and windows logged off and shutdown. Not sure how it happened but it did. When I turned it back on, it would not boot. It could not find the boot record on the hard drive. I have a set of six disks to boot windows XP, but I downloaded them in order to install XP. I'm afraid to use them because i dont know if using them will try to reinstall XP. I took the hard drive out of the computer and made it a slave drive on another computer just so i could backup all the files that i dont want to lose. However, when the drive is plugged into the other computer...it wont allow it to boot either. The second computer used Windows 98, and boots fine when the second drive is not installed. Once i put the crapped out drive in it, it gets to the point where it finds the boot records, but then it just hangs and does nothing.

Does anyone know of any thing that causes the boot files to be lost or deleted? Is this a known virus? Is there any way to get the files saved off the drive? I hope it's not a virus, because i just ran a compete system check 2 days ago. I ran AVG, Ad-Aware, and The Cleaner and neither AVG or The Cleaner picked up on any virus.

If anyone knows how to fix this, please help me.
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#2
-=jonnyrotten=-

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Do you have an XP installation cd? You can run a "repair" install and you won't lose any thing, you will just have to re-download all windows updates again. In order to hook up the other hard drive as a slave you need to move the jumper on the back of it to the slave position. I would be very careful doing this though as you may infect your clean hard drive with the bad one. I suggest putting it back and trying a repair install first. I just noticed the other pc is a win98 machine. I don't think you will be able to read the hard drive with XP on it unless for some strange reason it is in FAT32 format like 98 is. You would have had to deliberately formatted the partition like that when installing windows. XP is NTFS file format and 98 is FAT32, XP can read Fat, but 98 can't read NTFS. You may be out of luck unless you can repair the xp install or find another pc with xp on it you can read the other hd from.

-=jonnyrotten=- :tazz:
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#3
Jehinkle

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ok...good call about on 98 not being able to read the drive...NTFS and FAT32 dont mix. I used the boot disks to get it to a setup menu. One option was to repair using the restore console. It didnt work because i've never made a restore point on my system. It said that a file was not found. The other option on the menu was to run windows setup. I chose that option and i got the blue screen of death telling me there was a fatal error. The problem is in the file "setupdd.sys." It said there was a 'page fault in non paged area'.

I knew that i needed a second hard drive anyway, so i got a new one. I installed windows XP on the new hard drive and made it the master drive. After the install, i shut down and installed the old drive as the slave. the computer boots fine from the new drive, but when i go to My Computer, it does not bring up the old drive. It only brings up the new drive. According to device manager, the drive is installed and working properly.

What can i do to have the old drive show up in My Computer?
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#4
admin

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You have two drives with Master Boot Records on them -- not a good thing. Did you try this Windows Repair method?:
http://www.geekstogo...p?showtopic=138
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#5
Jehinkle

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I tried the repair method once, i get to the point where it asks me to select an operating system to repair, but there is nothing there. There is a message that says 'setup cannot access disk'. Tried it again and got the same thing...'page fault in non paged are'. Last time it named a specific file, this time it did not.
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#6
admin

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As long as it's not an OEM installation of Windows, this should work:
http://support.micro...5&Product=winxp
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#7
Jehinkle

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When i got to the recovery console, it says that the file or path is invalid whenever i use any command. I changed the directory to A:, and after that i tried to switch back to C:, but i could not. It looks like my drive is empty....like has never been partitioned or anything. when i was at the C: prompt, hitting Dir brought up nothing....the drive appears to be completely blank. Anything at all i can do now?
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#8
-=jonnyrotten=-

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Does your bios recognize the fact that there are 2 hard drives connected?

-=jonnyrotten=- :tazz:
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#9
Jehinkle

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yes...BIOS sees both hard drives, as well as device manager. I have a Maxtor and a Western Digital hard drive. The maxtor is the one that is fried.

I looked in Admin Tools>Computer Managment>Storage>Disk Management and the Maxtor does not appear in there. I've tried uninstalling it from the device manager and after the reboot it is detected again, but still wont appear in My Computer or Computer Management.
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