Computer restarts! Can't do anything! Help needed!

[Lian]

well, guys
I had to reinstall windows xp. and it was my hard disk's problem. it had some 'unrecoverable problems'. so i lost everything in one of my hard disks. now i have to start all over. but, thx for your help guys!

[MSNwar]

Bad Master Boot Record (MBR). Now you have to determine what caused it and more importantly determine if it will happen again. When you originally installed XP did you do an upgrade or clean installation? A bad installation will corrupt the MBR. This happens when you are formatting the hard drive and you receive an error. It is even possible to have more than one MBR and when XP is loading it reads the wrong MBR. It is not rare to run XP for months and run into the corrupt MBR issue.

The short, but best fix is to always use the manufacturer's hard disk utility to configure a hard drive before installing XP.

[rik]

Agreeing with all that went before...

For the future if you are really trying NOT to reinstall you can run fdisk /mbr from the command line in the recovery console.

[elgatogrande]

I just fixed a Dell Inspiron with the same problem without reinstalling or losing any data.

I booted to the Dell CD (put CD in, power on and hold down f12 to get the option).

Went to the recovery console and ran chkdsk c: /r (this took about an hour on a 30gb disk).

Then I followed the directions from this site:
http://digitalwebcast.com/2002/03_ma..._boot_toot.htm

One of my files had to have a .bak extension added to work but you can use cd and dir from the recovery console to verify the location and names of your files.

As always Your Mileage May Vary.

I would like to know if NTFS was being used by anyone who is having this problem.

Thanks and I hope it helps.

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No blue in the correct addy.