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Old 03-15-2005, 03:26 AM   #1
ironliver
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Registered: Mar 2005
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Unhappy Booting Problems (XP and Linux)


Im completly frustrated right now, and out of things to do. Hopefully someone here will have an answer or direction.

Info about my comp:

Abit NF7s
Athlon 2800
SATA HD (Originally had Win XP on it)
ATA HD (Arch Linux)

I tried putting on Arch Linux on my ATA Drive. The installation went fine (i think). I put the grub loader onto my SATA HD. When i went to boot, the grub loader wasnt working. The screen just kept displaying 'GRUB' all across the screen, and kept repeating. Nothing would boot.

I decided to just try to get my Windows XP working again. I did this by booting off the WINXP cd and going into the recovery console. I tried the fixmbr , fixboot, bootcfg commands from tutorials ive read, but it wasnt working. The error i would get now is "Error Loading Operating System". Now, Im really panicking, as i have A LOT of information i dont want to lose. When i go into the recovery console, i still see my files, can read log files, but when i try to access some other directories, it says 'access denied'.

I then decided just to re-install Windows XP onto my SATA drive. When the XP installation listed the Partitions, it had listed the NTFS partition, but it said i couldnt install onto it unless i format or partition it (i forgot if it said format or partition, but it was one of the two). As i said earlier, i have many things on the drive that i dont want to lose. So i just stopped the install.

So next i tried to put WindowsXP onto my ATA drive. My reasoning is that maybe i can see the SATA drive in XP, and back things up onto my ATA drive, so i can reformat/partition the SATA drive, then reinstall xp onto that.

I just repartitioned it and formated the ATA drive with the WINXP CD Install (NTFS), the install goes through, but when it goes boot, it says "Error Loading Operating System" Again!! I have no idea why it is doing this. I even unplugged the power to the SATA drive, as i thought maybe it was getting mixed up. Nope didnt work. I went into the BIOS, and tried every HD in the bootup order, but it all said the same thing.

This is really crazy to me. Why would it do this? It should be just like putting XP onto a blank HD right? I've done that plenty of times. So as of now, my computer is sitting there absoluty useless. Nothing works.

Sorry this is so long... just wanted to give the whole story. Anyone have any ideas to get my Computer working again? and also not losing my info on the SATA drive?

Im also sorry for this being more of a windows question... but i dont know what to do right now...

Last edited by ironliver; 03-15-2005 at 03:27 AM.
 
Old 03-15-2005, 03:50 AM   #2
gjo
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Registered: Aug 2004
Location: South India
Distribution: Fedora3,Xandros,WinXP
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hello iron,
Now ur ATA drive is empty
So try to format and reinstall XP in the ATA drive after disconnecting the SATA drive

Check the boot order in bios also....

And check now.. is it boot or not.
If ok, connect the sata drive and check the BIOS

Best of luck !!......
 
Old 03-15-2005, 02:49 PM   #3
ironliver
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Registered: Mar 2005
Posts: 4

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Quote:
Originally posted by gjo
hello iron,
Now ur ATA drive is empty
So try to format and reinstall XP in the ATA drive after disconnecting the SATA drive

Check the boot order in bios also....

And check now.. is it boot or not.
If ok, connect the sata drive and check the BIOS

Best of luck !!......
Ive tried that, and it hasnt worked


This makes no sense to me. If i partition and format a drive EVERYTHING is erased correct? How come i cant install Windows on a blank HD.. makes no sense.
 
Old 03-15-2005, 04:50 PM   #4
soulstace
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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: USA
Distribution: Knoppix
Posts: 64

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Quote:
If i partition and format a drive EVERYTHING is erased correct?
Actually thats not true at all. Data can be recovered off of a drive that has been formatted multiple times over.

What kind of drives do you have? Did they come with any kind of recovery utilities or tools? A couple drives I have (Maxtor and Western Digital) came with some utilities on floppy disk to help set up the hard drive.

BTW, the error "Error loading operating system" is result of the Master Boot Record not finding the operating system loader (for windows xp this file is ntldr on the root partition, the first partition on the first hard disk ie "primary master").

So it is likely that all you need to do is set up the ATA HD as primary master drive. Then boot from the xp cd, create a partition, format it, and install windows. I don't see any reason why it would not boot then. Just so long as you set it up as the primary master drive, and you also had the BIOS set to boot from it.

Last edited by soulstace; 03-15-2005 at 05:11 PM.
 
Old 03-16-2005, 12:08 AM   #5
ironliver
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Registered: Mar 2005
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I found the problem why i wasnt able to load XP onto the ATA drive.

I had to change the HD mode, to LBA. Before it was set to auto.. i still dont know why that wouldnt work., but it didnt. When it was listing the devices in the table, it was listed as CHS. Dont know what that means, but now its in LBA mode and working.
 
Old 03-17-2005, 05:47 AM   #6
gjo
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Registered: Aug 2004
Location: South India
Distribution: Fedora3,Xandros,WinXP
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Now u r able to boot the HDD...OK ..nice..

The normal or default mode used by "regular" hard disks that are below 504 MiB in size is called variously Normal or CHS mode, where "CHS" stands for "cylinder, head, sector", the three parameters used in hard disk geometry specifications. In this mode, there is no translation done at the BIOS level, and the logical geometry presented by the disk is used by the BIOS directly. Remember that this is still logical geometry. The actual physical geometry is known only to the disk controller.

Each hard disk using CHS mode is limited to 1,024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, or 504 binary megabytes. This is also the only mode available on older BIOSes, from before about 1994. When hard disks above 504 MiB in size are used with one of these older BIOSes, the infamous 504 MiB barrier is hit.
 
  


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