Boot Disk Error?!?!?

[TheGrifter]

OK..

A week or so ago, my father's PC went tits up. After some deliberation we figured the mobo had burnt out somewhere.

We decided on buying a motherboard bundle (comes with CPU and RAM pre-installed) by way of an upgrade for him as well. Great. It arrived and I stuck it in. Seems to work fine.

However the machine will not boot from the hard disk. I am considering using te WinXP disk to do a repair. If that doesnt work i`ll do a complete re-install...but this obviously will wipe his saved data.

Anyone got any better idea's??? Would be greatly appreciated.

 

[biglebowski]

use the recovery console to repair the MBR but if it is saying operating system not found it could be a faulty hard disk

That rug really tied the room together, did it not?

 

[TheGrifter]

OK...ran the recovery from the WinXP disk.

Still comes back with "Disk Read Error" when trying to boot from the hard disk.

Please tell me this isnt a hard disk error.

 

[biglebowski]

did you have a diagnostics cd with the hard disk if so boot the pc off this and run the diags. If not I think you can download it from the manufacturers website and burn it. The "ultimate boot cd" also has hard disk diagnostics so you could also download that.

That rug really tied the room together, did it not?

 

[PurdueTNT]

If you are truly worried about the data. HDD's are fairly cheap and most have extra's laying around. just put the OS on a different disk and make the current disk a slave on the IDE bus (making an assumption that the PC uses IDE). Then all you have to do is reinstall the programs that are on it without any risk of losing data.

 

[TheGrifter]

well I have put in another hard disk....and it booted first time from that.

bugger of buggers

so i`ll have to go buy another disk it seems.

 

[ptco]

run chkdsk /r by any chance..same error message at boot with a recent machine and it fixed it up for me????

 

[linney]

Might be some help in these to give you a few clues at least. It wont hurt to read them.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm

http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html

249694 - How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;249694&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

Blue Screen with new motherbaord
thread779-1069563

Reinstalling XP
thread779-649143