The other night I was on the computer, got a BSOD with an error message and the computer shut down. I went to bed and figured I’d deal with it in the morning.
The next day I tried to start it up and I would get an error “S.M.A.R.T. Command Failed” for the primary master (250GB partitioned into system drive and storage). After a bit of reasearch I figured out what it meant and disabled SMART in the BIOS. The computer would attempt to start, but always just cycle back to the boot screen. Sometimes it would start the Starting Windows XP screen, sometimes it wouldn’t.
I decided to try and install a fresh copy of XP on my spare drive (currently slave) and see if I could get the machine running that way. It wouldn’t seem to install, after formatting, the setup would fail to load ntldr and something else (tried twice). So I tried another CD, this time the format took about 2hrs to get 10% done (on a 12GB drive).
This morning I brought over another drive that was out of a running machine to try and use that to boot from. Put it in, start up, and all it does is cycle to the boot screen. It keeps restarting over and over. Regardless of whether or not I try and start in safe mode, normal, or whatever, the same thing happens.
Any ideas on what to check next?
If anyone can get me back up and running without data loss, I’ll paypal you $50.
ehh… there’s gonna be data loss any way you do it… your main drive is on it’s death bed. May be able to copy the files over… but some or most may end up corrupted…
sounds more like he took the drive from some random machine and tried putting it in, using that computer’s already installed software … sometimes they dont freakout… usually they do.
Ok, it got through most of it and now it says “Setup cannot copy the file: shl_img.inf” retry, no good. Skip, does the same with the next file. Should I assume that this other drive is probably bad too?
Swap out your RAM. That is the first place i would look. During the file copy process, it seems like there is some corruption which would explain why format is not working the way it should as well as those file copy errors. What kind of RAM do you have, I might have some spare at work I can send you.
If you have access to another computer try to get this loaded to a floppy and run it to see if it finds anything. Also if you’ve had it for awhile you might want to pull the memory and check the contacts and check for corrosion then reseat it.
sounds like problem is bus controllers, try to disable DMA or ata 100/66/33, if you have option to run PIO 1/2/3/4 try that if you dont have option to disable the dma or to select bus speed, use a 40 pin cable, that should auto bring your speed to a max of dma 33. then try to install again, if this dont work, try bios update.
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can also be ram, check that test out.
