Hard drive problems help needed.

lamb7994

Posted on behalf of a friends as i can't help him.

Daughter has a DELL PC with SATA harddrive that wont boot up ( corruption on first bit of windows XP apparently )
desperately need the data off the HD as its work stuff .


How can i access this or how can i repair the corruption?


James

Dark_Forces

do you have the original xp installation disk?

Browntoa

you need a Dell Xp disk. I think this is the "Stop 0x000000ED" error that says the hard disk is Unmountable ??

Browntoa

How to Repair the Boot Sector:

If XP won't start it may be due to a damaged boot sector or a missing or corrupt ntldr or ntdetect.com files.

To replace damaged ntldr and ntdetect.com you can copy fresh files from the XP CD using the COPY command. Boot with the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console (as above). At the Command Prompt type the following (where "X" is your CD-Rom drive letter) allowing the files to overwrite the old files

COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C:
COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:


if not then


To repair a damaged Boot Sector at the command prompt type FIXBOOT and press Enter. Then answer "Y"


but you need an Xp disk for this (or the files on CD from another XP Machine and some form of boot disk))


worked for me in the past , had very simliar problems and only needed to do the first bit



http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm#How%20to%20Repair%20the%20Boot%20Sector:

worse case you need a Knoppix" or other Boot disk to gwt the info burnt off the hard disk before using the Dell restore

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&dn=1090151

lamb7994

does the dell xp disc come with the pc?

or is direct from dell


I'll check with him to see if he has the disc


James

Browntoa

if it is a new machine then it is only on a partion on the hard disk I'm afraid

Any XP disk will do to Copy the 2 files over

skiddy2k

or you can put in any XP CD, load the CD, when prompted, go into the recovery console (press R). a black dos-type screen will come up, type in "fixboot c:".. when done (should take less than a miniute), restart in normal mode (type in "exit")
if it doesnt work, go back to recovery console and type in "chkdsk /r" and wait!... will take a hour or 2, but it might work!

albertross_2

did you mean fixboot c: or just fixboot on it's own.

skiddy2k

i usualy type in "fixboot [drive]", usualy "fixboot c:".... woopsie! forgot!
thanks for pointing it out albertross!