Member Avatar for pampier

Hi! Thanks in advance for any help!
I recently installed xp pro sp2 on a new wd hard drive. Yesterday, it shut down for no reason....restarted several times and came back up. The last time, I got a boot failure message. When I use my cd and start the recovery console, my secondary hard drive is C:. I cannot find my primary hard drive using the recovery console.

I checked bios and it's fine, the drive is running....but the windows cd doesnt think it's there.

I disabled my secondary drive and removed it and tried to boot from cd, but that didn't help.

My next step is to switch hard drives on my pc and put the new drive in the secondary spot in case my motherboard is going out. But I thought I'd post here first.

Any ideas?

Pamela

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Member Avatar for Catweazle

Sounds to me like the drive is on the way out or already cactus. The Windows CD should be able to 'see' the drive even if no partition is created on it.

Member Avatar for pampier

thanks for the help.

Member Avatar for Lightninghawk

I'm going to put a lot of suggestions here so read through them and bear with me. You might have already tried all of these... but there is never a way to be too sure.

UMM... the wierd thing to me is. Why do you have your secondary drive as C: and not your Primary drive? (just a thought)

Have you made sure that the jumpers are set correctly on your both your Hard drives (master/slave situation)?

Are your IDDE Cables ok? (plugged in, cleaned out, free of dust, not cracked,) you might want to try switching IDDE cables to double check that.

Have you tried switching the Hard Drives? (would follow after checking IDDE Cables)

.........................................................................................................
You say this happened after installing XP SP2?

OK I have a couple of things to say to that.

1. Your just a little late on getting that installed because some of those security updates are very needed on most machines.

2. What kind of machine do you have? Some machines have been known to crash because of SP2. Reason Unknown :eek:

Member Avatar for Catweazle

Lightinghawk, the secondary hard drive has been identified by the system as C: because the primary hard drive is malfunctioning and not visible to the system. The mention of SP2 is indicative only of a coincidence, not a cause.

Member Avatar for Lightninghawk

Hmm.. My bad. Didn't even think of that.

So could it be possible that he has a bad IDDE cable?

Member Avatar for guybo

Lighthawk:
Like you, I would immediately suspect either a bad ide cable or a bad connection. Bad connections are often hard to spot visually. So disconnect and carefully reconnect the ide cable

Member Avatar for thepastimer

If the BIOS is detecting the drive as pampier said, the cable should be fine. I would think that the drives master boot record has been corrupted if the install cd will not detect it. It may need to be run over with a magnet. (Don't run a magnet over it unless you're absolutely sure, it will wipe the entire drive)

Edited by thepastimer because: n/a
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