Drive Stopped Booting

[jdetray]

Recently, my spare computer, which I only use once or twice a week, stopped booting from its hard drive. The system had worked fine the previous time I had used it. Over the next few days it booted up twice in over 100 attempts, but despite *many* subsequent re-starts, it now fails to boot from the C: drive at all.

When it gets to the point in the boot sequence where hard drive access should begin, after a single POST beep, it instead hangs, with the floppy drive activity light on. No error message is displayed, and the floppy drive activity light remains on indefinitely.

The data on the hard drives (10 GB C: and 4.3 GB D <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0"> appear to be intact. That is, if I boot from a Win98 Startup floppy to a command line prompt, I can see and access the files and folders on the hard drives. I also have access to the CD-ROM.

I have tried the following:

1. I installed the command-line version of Norton Anti-Virus with the latest virus definitions. After cranking away for more than an hour, NAV reports no viruses.

2. Reformatted the C: drive and re-installed Win98. Everything proceeds normally until Windows Setup re-starts the computer, at which point the system hangs with the floppy drive activity light on.

3. Reconfigured the C: drive with Maxtor's MaxBlast software (the C: drive is a Maxtor 10 GB). Again, everything is normal until the software re-starts the machine, at which point it hangs as described above.

Any thoughts on what else I can try? The C: drive has already been reformatted, so it's not a question of recovering its data; I'd simply like to get the machine working again or at least figure out why it is not booting.

Thanks,
Jeff DeTray
[email protected]

[Scuba]

I gess the MBR of the drive went FUBAR. (At low level).
you can try to Low Level format it and reinstall but it might not work also.

[shamus]

Have you tried fdisk /mbr to rebuild the boot record? also have you checked or replaced the floppy drive cable? If the light stays on it could be a defective cable...just a thought...

[jdetray]

Thanks for your replies.

Yes, I've tried FDISK /MBR, and it failed to make the drive bootable.

The floppy drive is working fine. I can boot from the floppy and even install programs on the hard drive. In fact, I installed DOS-based file transfer program on the hard drive and used it to transfer some files to my other computer.

To summarize, I can boot from the floppy drive. I can access and even install programs on the hard drive. But no amount of reformatting, FDISKing, SYSing, or virus checking has been able to make the hard drive bootable.

I have installed DOS, Win95, and Win98 on the hard drive (reformatting between each install), and the drive won't boot with any of those operating systems.

I could use some ideas for new things to try!

Jeff DeTray
[email protected]

[Sowulo]

Make sure the primary partition on the drive is set to 'active' in fdisk. Will the HD boot in a different system?

[xenomorph9]

you should try ZAP wipes that sucker CLEAN.. had a problem like that... "ZAPPED" it.. seemed to take care of the problem.

[ScooterWad]

Sounds to me like your IDE controller on the MOBO went post toastie. Try booting your HDD from the secondary IDE port. Xeno's right, that Wipe s/w works great. That may work, too.

100....whoop tee doo!