[RKinner]

it was in the Physical Drive 0

I think it is going to try to boot off the drive 0 unless you change the boot order so what was happening is it is trying to boot from a drive which doesn't have an operating system.

You have to make sure it is not confused about which drive to boot from.

Not sure why it couldn't boot from the CD tho. Perhaps the drive is defective?

[Advertisements]

I think it is going to try to boot off the drive 0 unless you change the boot order so what was happening is it is trying to boot from a drive which doesn't have an operating system.

Yes i was just thinkin so, but i dont know what happened, since i havent changed the boot order in the bios; the strange thing is that on rebootin, it wasnt seeing any of the 2 SATA drives...

You have to make sure it is not confused about which drive to boot from.

I dont know why it got confused about the booting drive; the order is correct, but after i plugged the "infected" drive, something made my system unhappy...

Not sure why it couldn't boot from the CD tho. Perhaps the drive is defective?

I think it wasnt booting from CD because it was still seeing the drive with no OS installed: in fact it asked me to install Windows on a partitin of the PATA drive, but i refused and canceled the installation.
I dont want to handle that HDD no more, i'm sure something bad will happen; unfortunately i cant check it neither from a live CD (i have Avira), since it isnt enabled on the system. I've heard of BartPE, but i dont know how to use it...if the operation could be dangerous, i'll try to find another PC for cleaning it...

[DaNeeLo]

I think it is going to try to boot off the drive 0 unless you change the boot order so what was happening is it is trying to boot from a drive which doesn't have an operating system.

Yes i was just thinkin so, but i dont know what happened, since i havent changed the boot order in the bios; the strange thing is that on rebootin, it wasnt seeing any of the 2 SATA drives...

You have to make sure it is not confused about which drive to boot from.

I dont know why it got confused about the booting drive; the order is correct, but after i plugged the "infected" drive, something made my system unhappy...

Not sure why it couldn't boot from the CD tho. Perhaps the drive is defective?

I think it wasnt booting from CD because it was still seeing the drive with no OS installed: in fact it asked me to install Windows on a partitin of the PATA drive, but i refused and canceled the installation.
I dont want to handle that HDD no more, i'm sure something bad will happen; unfortunately i cant check it neither from a live CD (i have Avira), since it isnt enabled on the system. I've heard of BartPE, but i dont know how to use it...if the operation could be dangerous, i'll try to find another PC for cleaning it...

[RKinner]

You might look for a USB-SATA adapter. Over here you can get them from amazon.com for less than $10. Then you can plug the sick drive in externally and not mess up the boot order.

Probably need one with a separate power supply or do like I do and leave the desktop open so I can power it from the PC.

I like Hiren's boot CD. His minXP option is really nice. http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

It's a zip file so you have to download it, right click on it and Extract All to get to the .iso file. Then use something like free iso burner to burn it. http://www.freeisoburner.com/

Remove all the drives except the sick one.
Boot off it and select the minXP option. Then you can work normally. There are a bunch of mbr tools on the CD. (Google the tool name for instructions)