I just picked up this PC from a customer
HP
pentium 4 1.8ghz proc
512 ddr ram
160gb HD PATA Western digital
OS Win XP sp2
Anyways the pc was getting an inaccessible boot device blue screen. So I put in the win xp cd and tried to do a repair. So when the disk ran through all the setup files and I got to my options I chose setup win xp, thinking that I would get the repair choice after it found the os vers. It did not, it continued to check the drive loaded some new file then rebooted. After that when I boot it up, it sits at a blinking cursor. The drive is kind of loud so I pulled it out and put as a slave in my test machine. I ran a diagnostics test on it and it passed. So then I booted with an win 2000 disk and went to the recovery console and ran the fxboot. That didn't work, then I tried the fixmbr - nothing! So I replaced the system boot files( boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.sys with good ones. Still nothing!
I did put that drive in my machine several times and some time it would be recognized and other times it would not be. Any input would be greatly appreciated.