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Help w/ a HD – Won’t load WIN2000, get ‘Disk Error’

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seth3rd

Technical User
May 12, 2004
1
US
Help w/ a HD – Won’t load WIN2000, get ‘Disk Error’

To start off w/ I thought that I had a somewhat decent grasp of the basics when it came to PCs: what an inaccurate perspective of my skills. I recently upgraded to a 200 GB drive (Maxtor, DiamondMax Plus 9 series – Ultra ATA/133) w/ an OS of WIN2000. I liked it and was happy, until I saw a friend’s XP OS. So I downloaded, from WinMX (I have so learned my lesson w/ that one), XP and tried to install it on my PC, but found out half way through the installation that two files were missing from the software. So I went back to using WIN2000, but XP had all ready converted some of my files and programs, thus making them inoperable w/ WIN2000. I tried, in vain, to get rid of the XP set-up, but could not. I then made the grave error of getting rid of all the data that had been acquired since I tried to install XP. I rebooted, only to find out that I could not get the PC to load Windows. (Later I found out that once XP starts, it can’t be stopped.) So now I receive an error message after it runs the BIOS that states ‘Disk Error, Press Any Key To Restart.’ I bought Norton SystemWorks and tried it out – advice from a guy at CompUSA. So the HD can be read via this software, and it scanned the disk and found no virus, but when I went to use the other utilities I get info that it cannot read the disk. I tried the Norton Disk Doctor utility, but no luck. Then I tried the Norton UnErase utility. The info read that I could repartition my drive, and that it would not alter most of the data, and that this was a safe thing to do. I ran the utility and was show what would be lost if I were to accept this utility; everything in the root directory would be erased. I have tried to access this drive w/ another drive, the one I am using now, but when this drive is on the same ATA line as the working drive I get the same ‘Disk Error’ message. I have a lot of data that I want on this drive and would rather not have to erase it. Does anyone have any ideas/comments on what I can do to get my data and drive working?

Thank you, from the guy that learned not to trust WinMX w/ OS.
 
Also try using a win98 install floppy and do a "fdisk /mbr"
the mbr switch clears the master boot record of the hdd and when you reboot either win2k or winxp will replace that with what it's supose to be
There is also a problem with win2k not recignising hdd's above 137gigs or installing ata 100/133 drives as ata66

ATA66 problem

LBA Problem
( support for XP but same problem fix for Win2k )
 
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