Question : Problem: HD with XP checks ok but no boot

Hi all,
I have a 30GB Hitachi hard drive that had XP+data on it when it wouldn't boot one day.
Ordered replacement HD, fixed some grounding tabs (in notebook) and installed XP on
new one. Recently, I have tried to reinstall the old 30GB. Upon installating and booting,
received 'A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to Restart'. Goes through
same loop ad infinitum. So put Win XP disk in CDROM drive and booted (Floppy, CD, HD,
NET in BIOS). Received the 'Press any key to boot from CD...' so do and receive 'Inspecting
hardware configuration...' and then nothing. The CD stops. Screen is blank. Ran Hitachi DFT
Utillity and reports nothing for Advanced search. HDD recognized in BIOS properly.

A little more history on the 30GB HD. Ran fine. Installed Acronis OS Sel 8. Created FAT32
partition within OSSel8. Tried to install Win98SE but couldn't find certificate after starting
(process..thought I had it). Removed FAT32 partition and resized to full size NTFS. Soon
thereafter, the not able to boot problem started . Since 2 other friends had their notebook
hard drives go, just figured it died and didn't attempt any fixes at that time.

What made me try it again? The replacement HD also exhibited this unable to boot/not be
recognized problem recently after OSSel8 was installed on it for a Win95OSR2 FAT32
install and then uninstalled. This led me to think that the previous problem wasn't really
the hard drive mechanicals. I am going to try to get to the System Recovery Console w/in
XP for the new one and run fixmbr C: routine from LucF in WinXP forum, but as inferred
above, I would really like to get this old 30GB up and running with the old data intact. It
was working with a good copy of updated XP when it 'stopped.'.

Is this really 'just' a MBR corruption problem? If I can get the MBR restored/replaced, do
I lose the data? How can I get to the fixmbr utility when I can't get it to boot from CDROM
with this drive?

Answer : Problem: HD with XP checks ok but no boot

PAQed, with points refunded (500)

modulo
Community Support Moderator