Even though I'm not too familiar with XP someone asked me to look at their system. When it starts to load you get the XP screen, then an error screen 'we apologize for the inconvience but windows did not start successfully', etc. Then it give the various safe modes, last good configuration and normal mode boot options. Choosing any of these causes it to reboot with the same screen.

I downloaded the XP home SP2 bootdisk set from microsoft and choose the 'repair a previous installation' option. Finally I get a dos prompt. A dir at the c:\> prompt gives 'An error occurred during directory enumeration'. Diskpart shows the partition but as 'unknown'. If I boot with a 98 bootdisk and run fdisk it shows the partition as NTFS so I know it's there.

With dos/9x an 'unknown' partition is usually a partition that hasn't been formatted. Could that be the case here? Since sector 0 is outside the normal partition area I suppose that message could come up even if the partition had been removed.

When I opened the case it looked like someone had done a sloppy job of installing a burner. The cdrom and burner were connected to the primary IDE with an 80-wire cable and the 40 gig HD was connected to the secondary with a 40-wire. I looks like they switched them because the 80-wire had two connections to accomodate both cdrom devices. I installed another 80-wire for the HD and switched them to the appropriate primary/secondary ports. I don't think this was the cause of the problem but I thought I'd mention it.

There was also a loose bag of hardware (screws, plastic offsets, etc.) banging around in the case. To make sure there wasn't any hardware damage from that I removed the 40 gig and attached a 3 gig test drive in its place. I installed 98 on the test drive with no problem so the MB is OK.

So, given the error message, the dir and diskpart results, does any specific explanation come to mind?

Hello,

The 9x dos will not read NTFS partitions. It comes up as 'unknown'. There is a program that you can use in DOS that will allow you to read NTFS

But in this case, I would run the manufacturers diagnostic on the hard drive, to insure everything is working fine there first. Especially if there could be some suspected damage from things banging around.

You can download the software you need for that from the manufacturer of the hard drive on the web.

If the drive comes up with errors, you know what the problem is.

Second: If after you ran the diagnostics and it comes up clean, it could be that the partition wasn't formatted correctly or faulted in some way. Try to delete the partition and recreate it again.

For some more helpful XP tips visit:

http://www3.sympatico.ca/computech911/Tips.html

Thanks, I know dos/9x won't read the partition but at least with 98 it will ID the partition as NTSF. I just wanted to verify an NTSF partition was there.

I hesitate to run any commands that may make things worse without having a good idea of what the problem may be, even the fixboot and fixmbr. I'd just as soon give it back and have them take it to a shop. I was hoping thoe symptoms may indicate a specific problem to those more familiar with XP than I am.

I may try the diagnostic disk. I hadn't thought about that.

SIGH

NTSF -> NTFS

Hello again,

The diagnostics will not hurt anything. Won't delete anything, won't modify anything. It just scans the drive.

Have your tried installing XP on the test drive yet?

When you are installing XP, are you upgrading from 98 or is it a full install?

For some more helpful XP tips visit:

http://www3.sympatico.ca/computech911/Tips.html

At this point I would have them abck the data up by putting their drive in as a slave and copying the files and trying to reformat the drive and see if a clean install fixes a bad boot record or if the format fixes a bad sector. I dont know that there will be much else you can try

Installing 98 on the test drive was just to verify there were no hardware problems (except possibly with the 40 gig). If it installed OK I figured the hardware was not the problem. I don't have an XP disk to experiment with.

I'm not sure they have another XP machine to copy/backup the data to. I have my doubts that it would be accessible that way since a bootdisk can't see anything either.

I'm going to boot it up now with the WD disk and see what it says.

It failed the diagnostics. They mentioned a s.m.a.r.t failure. I enabled that option in cmos to check and sure enough its status was reported bad there too.

Thanks for suggesting the diagnostics. I had assumed it was an OS problem.