Error Loading OS ... on WinXP

[KG4CGC]

Guess this is a deal breaker and the HD has gone into retirement.
Checked all connections.
What's next? HD replacement?

[W4GPL]

That's a rather premature diagnosis. It could simply be missing key system files, for whatever -- not necessarily related to the hard drive going bad. What sort of system is it? Many of the big manufacturers have diagnostic tools on a separate partition that you can boot to.

[KG4CGC]

OK. I'll see if it will let me change the boot order. It should. Maxtor has a diagnostic disk I can use. Pretty much all we use around here is Maxtor.

[kf0rt]

We had the HTPC crash here Saturday night. Wouldn't boot -- SIL looked up the error and "it" said something about all five registry images were corrupt (Tiny XP). "Copy these files over from a distribution CD and let Windows rebuild it." Did that, and it came back up. Had to reinstall the video and audio drivers, but it appears to be working again. Took two hours and might have been faster to just reinstall except that reloading WoW over a WiFi connection might have taken all night.

I probably need to reinstall XBMC now (the only other program loaded on that machine).

Has me wondering about putting a bootable WoW system on a USB stick. Probably no reason that machine even needs a hard drive.

[WØTKX]

If that drive is old or suspicious with diagnostic issues, get a new one and image the old to the new if you can.

You may want to hook that drive up on another PC, not setup to boot.
See if you can back it up. Can you make or acquire an an XP floppy and/or boot disk?
No? Try this... http://www.bootdisk.com/ Then try CHKDSK /MBR Good chance this will fix it.

Run some read diagnostics, and try to copy/image that drive onto a bigger one. Partition Magic is a favorite software tool of mine for that kind of stuff...


Other things to check:

Is that drive still found in the BIOS, with the right geometry (probably translated), and controller type?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326676

Success Story, Missing OS (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linuxquestions-org-member-success-stories-23/success-story-error-loading-operating-system-at-end-of-bios-bootup-239279/)

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic43072.html

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm

[KG4CGC]

How about this, power supply?
I hit the switch in the back to shut it down for a while until I could get back to it. Now, nothing. Guess I'll have to tear into it now.
Could a PS issue cause the error message I encountered?

[WØTKX]

Ab So Lute Ly. Like no 12 volts, no disk spin.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWorSepWyJQ

[KG4CGC]

Good Lord! Those guys figured out how to make money producing the stuff they do. God bless them.