Disk Boot Failure Advice Please

I have a friend running XP Home on a Gateway 400c who is having boot problems. When his system firsts begins to start, there is no mention of his hard drive-only his CD-ROM. We went to the BIOS and made sure the options for Primary master and slave were set to “Auto”. He has made a boot disk from a computer running Windows 98, inserted it, and typed A:\ C: but is told that “C:\” is an “invalid drive specification”. Does this mean the hard drive has failed? He should at least be able view the C drive using a boot disk, shouldn’t he? I have found a site that mentions making my own XP Boot disk by copying the files below to a blank floppy:
· boot.ini
· NTLDR
· ntdetect.com
· bootsect.dos (if present)
· ntbootdd.sys (if present)
I can’t use the Recovery Options as this copy of XP was installed from an MSDN Subscription CD containing 10 licenses. You can’t boot to these CDs as they contain both XP and XP Pro buried several folders deep. Someone suggested the FDISK /MBR command ran from a Windows 98 floppy but we are separated by 70 miles and decided to break until Sunday. I know XP has a FIXBOOT command but how would I get there EVEN if this is the problem?
How can we solve this problems. I was pretty sharp at this stuff 3-4 years ago {I was certified as an MCSE in NT 4.0} but 3-4 years in this business is an eternity. All I do now is logon to the Internet, pay my bills, read my email, and bug you guys with problems I no longer know how to fixJ

Thanks,

Jeff

If the bios cannot see the hard drive, then windows can't either.

Put the drive in another machine to ascertain whether it's the drive or the cable/controller thats gone bad. If the drive works ok in another machine (ie it is detected).. then put a known good different drive in the faulty machine and see if the bios detects it. If it does not, change the cable, try again, and if that doesn't work, try changing to the secondary ide port.

It could be as simple as a bad cable, or jumpers set up wrong. It could be the motherboard controller has gone. You have to work it out by a process of elimination and check the results with other machines.

"He has made a boot disk from a computer running Windows 98, inserted it, and typed A:\ C: but is told that “C:\” is an “invalid drive specification”. Does this mean the hard drive has failed? He should at least be able view the C drive using a boot disk, shouldn’t he?"


if the machine is on ntfs ,,,you won,t see ntfs from a dos boot disk ,,,,,and fdisk/mbr will kill the drive.

continue with noo-noos advise



freddy

I would also enter the bios and try to find the Auto Detect Harddrive or if thats not present usually in the Standard menu you can view what harddrives are detected and there may even be a auto detect by scrolling down to primary and hit enter