XP Pro not booting

Eye

Ok this is a long one and not sure if it is best left in here or moved to the computer forum so mods feel free to corect if you think this ain't the right place.

Right where do i begin....

my machine has 4 hdds, 2x OS drive and 2x Storage, recently i just got a new hdd and am planning to move my OS to that and format my old OS drive to a storage and an old storage drive is moving to another machine. sounds more confusing than it actually is :-\ anyways as it stands now i'm in the middle of moving everything onto the new drive and have'nt yet wiped my old OS drive so there is now 3xOS drive and 1x storage.

Now my dad was booted into his hdd earlier today and decided to run a defrag on his drive as he does alot of photo editing and such he likes to keep things running smoothly, however after about 2hrs he noticed norton speed disk had crashed and said that c: was being blocked and so it could'nt continue, at this point he tried closing things down but it was so slow that nothing seemed to be responding, eventually ctrl+alt+del got things closed out but even that frooze on him so he had to hit the reset button.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse, when he tried to boot into his drive again it would'nt even bring up the windows logo at all to begin loading and no hdd activity was present.Next we tried my old OS drive and this time the windows logo appears and the bar moves accros a few times before it goes againm but then after that it does'nt actually load up the desktop just stayed with a blank screen. Tried this a few time and still the same result, next came my new OS drive which had the same trouble booting as my drive, gets some of the way but not all the way. Also when trying to boot into safe mode the same thing happens, she goes some of the way but never loads the desktop.

After a while i went back and tried my drive booting normally and when it got to the point where it should have been loading the deskop there was alot of hdd activity so i left it run it's course and after about 10-15 mins on a blank screen, the windows chkdsk screen came up saying it needed to check one drive, that drive being my dad's drive, the one with the defrag crash.
anyways i left that run all afternoon and just as i was getting reading to head out this evening after about 5 hrs of scanning the chkdsk seemed to finish up but with lots of errors and it tried to reboot again so i hung around for a few mins.

So after that 5 hr chkdsk scan on my dads drive i said i would try and boot into my drive and see what the damage was like and if he lost much in the line of files. same thing as before happens, its booting almost all the day to the desktop however this time instead of dying, a very quick BSOD flashes up and straight away it reboots. Now it is doing this with both my new and old OS drives, but my dad's drive still is'nt even getting the windows logo to appear it's just completly lifeless.

just got back home a while ago and setup a digital camera to record the BSOD to see what the hell was going on and what i get is as follows:

"A problem was detected with windows and was shut down to prevent damade to your computer...."

"blah blah blah ... run chkdsk .... blah blah"

"Technical Info: Stop 0x00000024"

After looking for info on the stop 24 it appears to be a ntfs problem with the drive. My problem now is that this is happening on the 2 drives that were not even being defraged at the time of the crash, so i am now completly stranded. i cannot run chkdsk as when i pop in a boot up disk and go to the command prompt to run it, none of the 3 disks affected are recognised there.

So people, my questions to you lot are:

1) is it possible to get the sorted easily, without reformatting all 3 drives?
2) how?
3) why would have spread from 1 hdd crashing during a defrag to now screw up 3 drives?

As always any and all info is greatly appreciated.

I know it's late and this is a long post but i hope your still awake

wheels of ire

My heart goes out to you.
Did anyone allow MS SP2 on automaticic updates?
Cos it really screwed up my m/c.

StRiKeR

i'm still awake alright wanna call me instead?? my eyes are running around all over the place after reading that long post mate

why did it spread, not sure, typical M$ product I suppose!!!

Eye

No SP2 was'nt done on the auto update, it was put in from cd :-\

anyways yeah i'll give ya a ring in a min striker, cheers

MazdaMan

Have you tried disconnecting all drives except the master, if that does not boot, then try each drive individually with the others disconnected and see if any of them will boot individually.

You could also try running a repair from the OS disk, boot from the XP disk, press F8 and choose repair option from list presented.

Gilgamesh

If you had Norton Speeddisk, does that mean mean you had ghost on the Drive aswell, if so, DID YOU USE IT????? to make a backup, if yes, then run that on the machine, but you will have to sacrifice the content of one of the Drives to reimage.

Eye

Okay here is the update now as to what i've tried and what i have found out.

Okay, before i begin many thanks to striker for using up most of my credit on the phone last night not to worry though as the advice was sound

Okay, as i had said none of the OS drives were booting when everything was connected so then the next stage was to disconnect them all and try them 1 at a time. First off my new drive booted fine, then my old drive also booted fine, so at least i know it has'nt completly screwed up those 2 drives next comes my dad's drive and well after all the biso checks it seems to just die a horrible death, nothing happens, i get a black screen and no hdd activity what so ever, no unusually sounds coming from the drive either just in case your wondering.

Now the weird thing is that when i plug in either of my drives along with my dad's drive, thats when i run in to the BSOD's with the stop 0x24 error on it

As suggested by striker last night i went and downloaded the maxtor utility powermax and ran this on the drive. first off the quick scan ran but said that an advanced scan was needed, when i left the advanced scan run it did'nt take more than 2 mins and it came back said it had found some errors which it thinks it can fix but you might loose some data from those segments, so i said fine and let it try and fix the drive and all seemed to go well and it told me it was successfull.

I then tried rebooting but again the drive seemed dead. now just for a laugh more than anything else i said i would run another scan with the maxtor tools and see if it was still finding that error or if it really had fixed the problem. A few seconds after hitting the scan option i get a wonderful error message saying "your drive is failing" please back up all you can then give this code to maxtor and send the drive off and get it replaced if it's under warrenty :rolleyes:

That's just wonderfull, anyways since the drive seems to be on its way out, if it's not allready gone, i tried one last thing suggested to me by striker and that was to try reinstall windows on the drive but without formatting so that i might be able to salvage some files from the drive if it worked. So i got my disks and let it boot from the cd and went to try and install. Strangely enough if sawthe sata drive okay and let me choose the partion i wanted and all that but as it was getting ready to copy files to the hdd to begin setup i got me another BSOD. It was the same Stop 0x24 error as before when trying to boot however this time at the end of the error in the technichal info it had 3 files listed there.
cpqarray.sys
cpqarray.sys
ntfs.sys
and after each was just a bunch of Hex addresses

So there you have it now, looks as though the drive is in fact completly buggered. I have one last thing to try but i really think that the odds of it working are somewhere between slim and none, but at this stage i'll try anything to recover some of my dad's files. Just trying to see if i can locate a pci s-ata controller card that i can hook my dad's hdd upto. Maybe just maybe with that drive being on a different controller it might allow me to boot into 1 of my own drives and if so, then once in windows if there is any life left in my dad's drive i might be able to salvage something, but like i said, i don't really expect it to work

thanks for all the suggestions and help all, it's been greatly appreciated but it looks like this drive is no more

StRiKeR

its getting nasty! I'm checking up on it at the minute, but hope that trick will let you boot in to windows by having them on seperate controllers!

StRiKeR

hmm.... more than likely the drive has failed, if having it on a seperate controller doesn't do the trick to even get enough time to back up what you need, its gone!

its a Physcial thing, the drive gonna need replace!! sorry...!

Eye

yeah i partly gathered that alright striker, thanks for the help though, won't know until tomorrow if i can get my hands on a pci sata controller card so will hold of sending off for a replacement until i can try that final test but in all honesty i don't expect it to work so i'm not getting my hopes up about getting any of my dad's files back. will let you know how things go though. cheers for all the help any people

StRiKeR

no prob! sorry cant help any further!

check out this thing

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Disk_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/R_Studio_Download.html

Eldarin

Ok mate the solution is very simple. What you have is a Master Boot record Failure. You nee to get yourself a bootable copy of XP Pro on CD. Boot the machine up using this and log into the repair console when the first screen comes up using the R key.

Next log in using your administrator password which is probably blank.

Now type the command 'fixmrb'

once this is complete run 'chkdsk' just to make sure there's no errors on the drives.

Type 'exit' now and remove the disk. It should boot up fine now.


That should be job done mate.

Eldarin

So people, my questions to you lot are:

1) is it possible to get the sorted easily, without reformatting all 3 drives?
2) how?
3) why would have spread from 1 hdd crashing during a defrag to now screw up 3 drives?

As always any and all info is greatly appreciated.

In answer to question 1 "Yes"
In answer to question 2 "See above"
In answer to question 3 "It happened becasue the master boot record controls the boot record of all drives in your machine with exception of the Cd Rom which is controlled from the Bios Chip. So when it went screwy because of Drive the rest decided to go pear shaped."

Cheers
Eldarin

StRiKeR

master boot record on first drive cannot control other drives

he couldnt boot even have that as a second drive!

P.S. MBR = Master Boot Record meaning it contents information of bootable system, does not have any control really!

BIOS = Basic Input Output System, meaning Control of specific Hardware!

Eldarin

The Master Boot record eg: MASTER means the bootable record of every drive in the PC and BIOS does have some control over system components in XP. Without a Master boot record the pc could not tell where the Partitions on the drive are, hence the blue screen error Eye's getting.

On thinking about this problem Eye probably won't be able to recover the data from his dad's hard drive but putting all the drives back into the pc and running a FIXMBR will allow whats there to boot without error. Trust ME on this I had the very same fault. Why else would I come straight out with a solution for the problem instead of humming and hawing about the problem like everyone else on this board.

If Eye does what I said above he will get any drives that are not totally Wrecked to boot and work perfectly. Try it.

StRiKeR

Eldarin wrote:

It happened becasue the master boot record controls the boot record of all drives

this is where you are not making it clear enough, (ALL DRIVES)???
Master Boot Record on Drive 0 has no effect to Drive 1, MASTER doesn't mean it is for all drives, every drive has its own MBR!

yes thats an idea but its not 100%

and by reinstalling the OS it will actually replace the MBR as the OS needs to write info into the MBR for the system to boot!which wasnt an option, but ok i wouldnt say it is not possible to fix the problem by going into the console and use fixmbr.but chances are 50 - 50

Remember as soon as the system trys to access the drive at the very begining it will lock up.

Personally I reckon the drive have a electrical fault, maybe I'm wrong!

Eldarin

I do reckon that the hard drive is totally ****ed. but re-writing the MBR will make windows reboot with the current configuration (assuming a bootable hard drive is on master). Its a case of fingers crossed when it comes to his dads drive working though, i reckon thats a gonner.

Eye

Ok just to clear this up, i had already tried reinstalling XP onto that hdd which would have overwriten the mbr and might have gone and worked, however i got a BSOD with the stop 0x24 error again.

Just to satisfy my own curiousity more than anything else i tried what you suggested but i can even get into the recovery console because to do that it has to scan for hard drives, and when it does it sees said hdd and then locks up for about 2 mins before giving the same BSOD.

Should be getting a loan of a nice powerfull magnet today so i can wipe the drive somewhat clear before sending it back to maxtor.

Eldarin

Ok well congratulations then you have a really rubbered hard drive. Whip it out and use it as a paper weight or a frizz-bee

Eye

LoL i would but that would be a waste of a hdd, it's only 2 months old
first bit of bother i've ever had with any of my 5 maxtor drives :-\
at least it's under warrenty so i should be ale to get it replaced without too much hassle

StRiKeR

see i told you, as soon as the system try to asscess the drive it locks up, happen before and it wont be any different today!