system failed to find bootable harddrive at startup

jmail137 · 05-16-2005, 07:42 PM

Ok so I have mandrake 9.0 installed on a maxtor diamondmax plus 8, 30 gb. The resto of the system is an Asus a7v333 mobo, w/ cd rom, 256 mb RAM. I wanted harddrive. yesterday I was playing around with it and it started to slow down, get really flakey, I had to do a hard shutdown, and attempted to restart it. unfortunately I have not been able to get it to reboot. I have error messages after the POST, that say "unable to find a bootable hardrive, disk failure,
I look in the BIOS configuration and it shows that no hd is found. have checked jumpers, cables, power, all seem to be ok. have switched power , and ribbon cables thinking they may be bad, still no luck.

I am guessing that whats wrong is after POST, there is a MBR problem. either its not there or corrupted. (due to my hard shutdown).
my question, how do I restore the boot up files, or get it to recognize the harddrive in the first place.

is there a more elegant way to restore than to reinstall the OS on the hd?

any help is appreciated.
I will be happy to answer any missing or misleading info provided.

Joel

PS I have tried putting it in as a slave drive with a working system that has windows 2000. also have tried plugging it into a Dell Mobo that I know is good and working. appears to be the harddrive not being detected or the Boot sector corrupted.

kira · 05-16-2005, 09:32 PM

it seems the hardware which arose this issue. i think you can change
hd and reboot again for checking.

nickleus · 04-17-2006, 01:56 AM

I have been running Fedora Core 4 on my dell inspiron 510m laptop. Apparently my battery is dead so when i pulled out the power cable the whole machine turned off immediately. When i had plugged it back in and tried to restart it i get the error:

Quote:

unable to find a bootable harddrive

I took out the 40GB drive and put it into a zynet fashion polar mobile storage solution 2.5" (inch) external enclosure usb house and connected it to another laptop running winxp pro. then i installed explore2fs 1.08 on the windows box and was able to access the files on both the ext2 partition (/boot) and the lvm2 partition (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00).

it was late at night so i backed up just my really important files and then turned off the windows machine and went to bed. when i got up the next morning and tried to backup the rest of the files i wanted, explore2fs no longer was able to read the lvm2 partition:

Quote:

Checking for LVM2
LVM2 Seek result is 512
LVM2 Read failed
No LVM2 detected
Found 1 ext2/ext3 partitions

I tested the hardware on the inspiron by putting other harddrives in it and booting them with success. From this i assume that there is nothing wrong with the inspiron laptop hardware so the problem must be somewhere among the files in the /boot folder on the fc4 harddrive because i can/could read the rest of the files..

where do i start looking for errors, how do i debug/fix this? many of those files are binary files. Here is the DOS tree output:

Code:

C:\NICK\NICKFC4-LINUX-LAPTOP-BACKUP\BOOT
│   bzImage
│   config-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
│   initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
│   initrd-2.6.15.img
│   System.map-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
│   vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
│   vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.old
│
└───grub
        device.map
        e2fs_stage1_5
        fat_stage1_5
        ffs_stage1_5
        grub.conf
        grub.conf.old
        iso9660_stage1_5
        jfs_stage1_5
        menu.lst.old
        minix_stage1_5
        reiserfs_stage1_5
        splash.xpm.gz
        stage1
        stage2
        ufs2_stage1_5
        vstafs_stage1_5
        xfs_stage1_5