Re: Yet another Disk Boot Failure debacle

dbubd wrote:

Hello all,

I just bought a new system including a Maxtor SATA HD and ASUS A8N SLI
Deluxe MB. It's all put together, WinXP installed on the SATA HD. When
I start it up... Disk Boot Failure (DBF)... Of course it starts up fine
with the WinXP CD in the drive. That is until I moved some hardware
around. Now it does the DBF sans CD and attempts to install a fresh XP
with the CD in rather than booting to Windows. To get around this I put
an old IDE HD in and installed XP on that. Boots up fine AND the SATA
HD shows up and SEEMS to run perfectly. My system just won't boot from
it.

In reading other posts about DBFs, I concluded that somehow the drive
must be bad. At lease in the boot sector. I tried all of the various
FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, etc. from the Windows XP recovery tools (pressing 'R'
at setup). Now, after all that failed to fix the drive, I'm getting set
to send it back to Maxtor. To obtain a RMA from Maxtor you must run
their PowerMax utility and get an error code from it when it reports
that the drive is bad! Well, I ran every utility on that disk with the
exception of Format and they all reported the drive to be in perfect
operating condition.

So now I've got a HD that won't boot and no proof that it won't.

Any suggestions to getting the HD to respond or how to deal with the
Maxtor catch 22?


I'd be inclined to get rid of the Maxtor drive and replace it with a
Seagate, Samsung or new (high capacity) Hitachi. I can only assume the
XP was installed with SP2, otherwise it may have had problems
recognising the SATA drive. Have you checked the BIOS settings? It
might also just be that the company you purchased the system from simply
has a standard hardware drive cloner that puts an image on a drive,
which they then stick in a machine and assume it will work.

I'd also *immediately* replace the chipset fan on the motherboard with a
decent third-party fan. The original Asus chipset fan is notorious for
failing. A decent replacement (in the UK) costs under £5. Otherwise,
the best of the ASUS SLI boards.


Odie
--
Retrodata
www.retrodata.co.uk
Globally Local Data Recovery Experts
.

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