Author Topic: More USSEnterprise Computer Woes... (Read 3865 times)

USSEnterprise · « **on:** October 22, 2005, 12:09:26 pm »

I'm getting quite sick of this. I think they should lock me up is a small room with nothing digital for a few years.

I was trying to flash my BIOS from a floppy, and now Windows says it can't mount my hard drive. I'm booting perfectly fine to my Linux partition. Any ideas?

J_K_M_A_N · « **Reply #1 on:** October 22, 2005, 12:13:16 pm »

I know it's no help but, I think Chad can mount your hard drive.(If you know what I mean) Just call him at Seph's moms house.

Actually, that may be caused by how it has dectected the hard drive. But it is weird that Linux still works fine. Good luck.

J_K_M_A_N

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #2 on:** October 22, 2005, 12:42:07 pm »

If he can, fine, but please use McAffe

Harry Potter · « **Reply #3 on:** October 22, 2005, 12:49:44 pm »

Quote from: USSEnterprise on October 22, 2005, 12:09:26 pm

I'm getting quite sick of this. I think they should lock me up is a small room with nothing digital for a few years.

I was trying to flash my BIOS from a floppy, and now Windows says it can't mount my hard drive. I'm booting perfectly fine to my Linux partition. Any ideas?

If you re-flashed your bios, it means it went to default settings. Go back into the bios and re-detect your hard drive and make sure you have the boot priority settings correct (ie Floppy 1st, HDD 2nd)

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #4 on:** October 22, 2005, 12:56:43 pm »

Already did. It sees the Hard drive as primary master. I have it set up to first go to the CD-ROM, then to Floppy, then hard drive. After I get past the boot loader, it gives me a blue screen of dreath of sorts.

Harry Potter · « **Reply #5 on:** October 22, 2005, 01:26:51 pm »

Re-install. Sounds like you busted MBR.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #6 on:** October 22, 2005, 01:31:42 pm »

But then, how does Linux boot?

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #7 on:** October 22, 2005, 02:19:17 pm »

And if it were the MBR, would I still be getting the "Windows XP Home" Loading splash screen for a few seconds?

grueinthebox · « **Reply #8 on:** October 22, 2005, 02:40:27 pm »

Windows XP doesn't really like it when you swap out major pieces of hardware (like a mobo) without prepping the system properly first. Chances are the changes to the BIOS made a difference in the way Windows sees it, and now you're boned. You could probably use an XP CD to boot into Recovery Console and replace the registry files, but it would probably be easier just to reinstall.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #9 on:** October 22, 2005, 03:18:04 pm »

I'd rather not lose the data, though

shmokes · « **Reply #10 on:** October 22, 2005, 03:36:19 pm »

Whoa there, tiger. You can fix an MBR short of a reinstall. Boot to your XP disc and load the recovery console. The command is:

fixmbr

You might also try:

fixboot drive name:

This will write the new Windows boot sector code on the system partition.

Also run chkdsk with the /f and /r parameters to repair bad sectors and clusters and stuff.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #11 on:** October 22, 2005, 03:38:45 pm »

I don't have one. Just the System restore disc that came with the computer, and uses a Symantec Ghost Image. I might have a bootleg CD somewhere. I'll look

shmokes · « **Reply #12 on:** October 22, 2005, 03:40:42 pm »

I added some stuff to my last post, btw.

grueinthebox · « **Reply #13 on:** October 22, 2005, 04:03:05 pm »

Quote from: shmokes on October 22, 2005, 03:36:19 pm

Whoa there, tiger. You can fix an MBR short of a reinstall.

I wouldn't really suspect a MBR problem in his case. Flashing the BIOS shouldn't affect that, and he's getting to the right partition - if he's getting a blue screen, Windows is trying to load. Ordinarily I'd say that rewriting the MBR wouldn't hurt anything, but since he's dual booting Linux there's a pretty good chance he'd be hosing his boot loader by doing so.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #14 on:** October 22, 2005, 04:14:26 pm »

Yeah, but if I must lose Linux, its all right. There's no irreplacible data on my Linux partition

Harry Potter · « **Reply #15 on:** October 22, 2005, 05:36:32 pm »

Take HD out, plug it into another PC, copy all stuff off then either:
1 Re-install
2 Smash HD with big hammer and feel better

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #16 on:** October 22, 2005, 06:15:25 pm »

Quote from: bosss7 on October 22, 2005, 05:36:32 pm

2 Smash HD with big hammer and feel better

Its brand new. No way in hell.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #17 on:** October 22, 2005, 07:21:25 pm »

Funny thing is, I actually had Partition Magic, on the partition that is inaccessable

duffjr · « **Reply #18 on:** October 23, 2005, 04:12:41 am »

i had to do that fixmbr stuff once. i also had the ntsf.sys error and had to replace the file. then i installed windows over itself once it was possible. then i loaned my computer out, and i heard the harddrive burned.

Jess-- · « **Reply #19 on:** October 23, 2005, 10:17:56 am »

if the bios update didnt contain any groundbreaking advances that you need (or fix any bugs that you have) why not just grab a copy of your old bios and flash back to original.

am still running original bios here as later versions only add support for cpu's faster than I have (or intend fitting) and fix bugs that dont affect me

should say that I am a great believer in "if its working ok dont change anything" to the point that I still have 4 web servers in operation with the following spec.... AMD K6 500 cpu, 256Mb ram, 6.4Gb Hdd, (these days thats laughable, until you think that these machines are still taking the full load of 400 websites each (averaging 15 million hits per day per server), and they only need rebooting about once every 6 months and I have never had to replace anything on them in 8 years. (then compare my other servers for streaming media, quad xeons 2gb ram, 160Gb hdds, these seem to fail every couple of weeks)

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #20 on:** October 24, 2005, 08:30:05 pm »

I was considering upgrading the processor.

All right. Thanks to the magic of Bittorrent, I now have Partition Magic 8.0 on my laptop. Now, which diskettes to I make and what is the command to rewrite the MBR?

jbox · « **Reply #21 on:** October 25, 2005, 12:17:07 am »

Quote from: USSEnterprise on October 22, 2005, 01:31:42 pm

But then, how does Linux boot?

My understanding is that Linux ignores the vast majority of what the BIOS tells it and does its own hardware discovery. Not sure how much, but an IT manager friend of mine explained that some of their machines were fine as file servers for that reason even though they crashed as desktops.

shmokes · « **Reply #22 on:** October 25, 2005, 02:16:54 am »

I've never used PM, so I don't know about fixing the MBR with it. What you need is a Windows XP CD to get to the recovery console. I seem to remember that FDISK on a Windows 98 boot disk could do it by typing Fdisk C: /mbr or something like that, but I've got a nagging voice in my head that's saying, "If you rewrite the MBR from FDISK, which works with FAT partitions, onto a drive that is formatted with NTFS you are a fool. And, more importantly, your computer will never boot again." But honestly, I don't know if that's true. My gut tells me not to do it from anything but a Windows XP CD.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #23 on:** October 30, 2005, 07:48:58 pm »

anyone have a windows XP Home CD they can lend me?

shmokes · « **Reply #24 on:** October 30, 2005, 07:51:42 pm »

Professional only. And seeing as that request, and my answer, talk about blatently illegal activity you'd better read this and PM before the thread disappears.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #25 on:** October 30, 2005, 10:15:32 pm »

But I wouldn't be installing it, not reusing the license, therefore nothing illegal

shmokes · « **Reply #26 on:** October 30, 2005, 11:51:16 pm »

Hmmm....well, at any rate, I could give you a Win XP Pro CD. I doubt it would make a difference as far as the recovery console was concerned, but I can't guarantee that.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #27 on:** October 31, 2005, 11:40:04 am »

yeah, I probably need a Home CD

Jess-- · « **Reply #28 on:** October 31, 2005, 12:31:37 pm »

from memory the command for fixing mbr is fdisk /mbr

win9x boot floppies have the files needed.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #29 on:** October 31, 2005, 03:02:22 pm »

But 98 is FAT32. XP is NTFS

ChadTower · « **Reply #30 on:** October 31, 2005, 03:04:31 pm »

Harry Potter · « **Reply #31 on:** October 31, 2005, 03:04:38 pm »

The MBR is seperate from the files systems. But the above says it better.

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #32 on:** October 31, 2005, 03:44:30 pm »

But MS-DOS can't read NTFS

Harry Potter · « **Reply #33 on:** October 31, 2005, 03:59:49 pm »

i hope you're being funny

USSEnterprise · « **Reply #34 on:** October 31, 2005, 10:22:25 pm »

I've never been able to get a win98 startup disk to see my hard drive

Jess-- · « **Reply #35 on:** November 01, 2005, 02:20:02 pm »

from memory MBR is laid down at the time when the drive is partitioned / made bootable, Actual format of the partition should not make a difference

_Iz- · « **Reply #36 on:** November 01, 2005, 02:45:42 pm »

/fix mbr is not going to solve his problem, it will most likely make it worse.

The problem is the new bios. It probably has a default setting that is different from the previous bios, most likely the ACPI. WinXP doesn't like being installed with ACPI off then having it turned on, hence the bluescreen you're experiencing. Try toggling the ACPI setting (or ones relating to it) and see if that will get windows to boot. If that doesn't solve the problem, the new bios may have more aggressive ram timings than your ram can handle, or the CPU is being overclocked. I would also try downgrading the bios to the original version (if you can).

Good luck and post back with results.


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