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Major problem

D

Dark Assassin

Gawd
Joined
Apr 10, 2003
Messages
605
Ok, all of a sudden I've hit a major problem with my system. It's been running fine all day until I left it about an hour ago to grab some food. When I get back, it appeared to be in safe mode (although it didn't reboot) and an alert pops up stating that Windows recovered from a serious error and should be rebooted.

I do reboot it, changing nothing and when I look at the post screen, it gets to "verifying DMI pool" and then gives me a message of "NTLDR is missing". What does this mean? And is there any way to salvage my hard drives?

Specs:

Abit IC7 - BIOS 21
P4 2.4c
(2) Maxtor DM9 120 GB SATA HD in RAID-0
Powercolor 9700 Pro
Kingston PC3500 HyperX @ 2.5-3-3-8
Windows XP Pro with SP1

Dark Assassin
 
I'm not being a smartass here, I swear. I just saw this same message at a customer the other day on a reboot. Turns out a floppy was in the drive so it wouldn't boot properly. Ejected and rebooted - worked fine. Took me a moment to realize that we had used the floppy drive about 30 minutes prior and left the disk in. Any chance you did the same?
 
Can you try booting off a cd or off a floppy?

My first thought, barring a floppy left in, is a harddrive failure.
See if you can boot off something and try to access it.
 
Monkey, I thought you might be my savior, but I realized that it wouldn't work because of my RAID format and the fact that my drives were partitioned into 3 different portions.

Theoretically though, if I installed Windows on an 80 GB HD I have lying around, wouldn't I be able to extract the information from the RAID volume (it's intact and normal) if I booted from the 80 GB? I would think so because the corrupted files on the RAID HD's is merely Windows.

Dark Assassin
 
You could also do a "repair" install of windows on top of your old install as long as the filesystem's not hosed beyond repair.
Of course you'll at least have to reinstall your drivers after doing this, and I'd probably just collect my data then format.
 
I had this happen before. I took my HD that wouldnt boot, put it in another machine, and copied the nt loader file from the good machine to my HD. Put it back, worked like a charm.

Or, you could make a DOS boot disk (with the NT loader file also on it), load up in dos, and copy the NT loader file to your HD.
 
Originally posted by Darkstar850
I had this happen before. I took my HD that wouldnt boot, put it in another machine, and copied the nt loader file from the good machine to my HD. Put it back, worked like a charm.

Or, you could make a DOS boot disk (with the NT loader file also on it), load up in dos, and copy the NT loader file to your HD.
Click to expand...

The 2nd suggestion isn't going to work if he's using ntfs on the drive
 
Yup, got XP loaded on this 80 GB hard drive and my SATA partitions are nowhere to be found in Windows.

I think I'm screwed...

Looks like I'll be losing over 4 years worth of programs, music, and other files. Son of a...

If anyone could better explain how to repair my installation of Windows on my SATA drives in RAID-0, then I'd appreciate it. I go under the console, but can't seem to make it do what I want.

My partition paths...

C:\ = Music and Movies
G:\ = Software and Windows
H:\ = Games

I'm absolutely waiting until I'm forced to reformat that RAID volume before doing it. I'd like to salvage the bare minimum data that's important to me, that's it.

Dark Assassin
 
A posting the other day had somebody with a tanked XP installation who couldn't find his data on another drive after reinstalling XP. Are your old partitions on your raid volume showing up as unallocated?
 
No, my 2 Maxtor hard drives aren't even being detected by my motherboard in BIOS nor are their partitions showing up in Windows.

I definitely think I'm screwed.

Dark Assassin
 
Win2K/XP/2K3 all have a built-in tool for repairing just such a problem. Boot off of the windows CD, and go to the recovery console, and use the commands fixboot and fixmbr. YMMV but many times i've fixed "hosed" drives like that
 
no way fixing that. not even the fix thing in xp, same thing happened here. format.......make new partion of C: drive.
 
Actually, I came off lucky. The first time I loaded the new bootable 80 GB hard drive, the SATA drivers I loaded didn't install properly and I don't know why. However, after attempting several hours of Recovery Console with other uber computer users and we finally gave up on that and attempted the backup again.

This time around, the SATA drivers worked and I was able to detect the RAID partitions on the other drive. I'm backing up right now, THANK GOD.

Excellent solutions, guys, I appreciate it. Lesson learned - backup your files immediately on a RAID-0. I just didn't have the other hard drive handy at the time to do it immediately. I'm reformatting the RAID volume now.

Dark Assassin
 
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