Lost: Boot Capability, CD & DVD-ROM Drives
Hello-
Last night I observed strang behavior on my computer and I noticed some icon appeared that indicated it was searching my drive. I didn't much attention, but ended rebooting to make this "thing" quit. I should've taken better notes.
Drives:
C:/ RAID Mirror with (2) SATA 120 GB Seagate drives
D:/ 160GB Western Digital
When I rebooted, I was unable to access my hard drive. I now believe the boot record was lost. I received msg to the affect "no NDLDR" or something like that was found, which I believe is the boot record. Moreover, my CD-R/W and DVD-ROM had difficult spining up. I eventually installed XP on drive D. Both drives "C" and "D" are intact. I do have updated NAV and it is used routinely on my computer...
Questions:
1. I need to identify whether my CD & DVD-ROM drives are functional or whether my motherboard is the culprit. Any comments on why both CD and DVD-ROM drives suddently go bad? Any comments on how I can troubleshoot the CD R/W & DVD-ROM drives? My plan is to simply replace one and try. If it works, then I have bad CD & DVD drives. If it doesn't, then I replace my motherboard. It just seems so strange to have both CD & DVD drives go bad.
2. My preference is to reinstall the boot record on drive "C" if possible. Any comments on how I can do this? ONce I resolve item #1, Can I simply do an "sfc scannow" and try and reinstall the boot files? Or Maybe simply reinstall the operating system, XP-SP1? Maybe I should reformat "C" and just reinstall the system, once I resolve whether I have a problem with a MB chip or both CD & DVD-ROM drives.
3. I upgraded on XP2 recently. I notice I have a folder "$WIN_NT$ & files designated as: "$LDR$", "txtsetup", and "VIRTPART" appearing on my drive "C" in the same hierarchy as "Documents and Settings". Where did these come from? Why are they there? THey seem to have appeard about the time I upgraded to WinXP SP2. Can I just delete these, which is what I'd like to do.
Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thx.
Scott
