Geek Help!
I'm rather perplexed with a situation I have here.
Parents computer, one I built about 6 mos. or so. all it would do was you go to boot up, it would complain about a corrupt boot.ini file, then go on to the Windows XP splash screen and then reboot, it would keep doing this, regardless of I booted from safe mode or not.
I tried to do a repair install of XP. It didn't even want to see the C: drive as a valid partition. After running chkdsk on it, I was able to get a directory listing from the repair console. However, now when I tried to boot I would get a "Disk Read error press ctrl-alt-del to continue" as soon it tried to boot from the hard drive. I know the data on there was still good so I didn't want to reformat before pulling the data off. So, I thought I would pull the hard drive from my currently dead desktop (motherboard failed, not had the fundage to replace it). Stick it in there and used that to retrieve the data. Stuck it in (Both SATA drives, parents drive on CH. 2 my drive on CH. 3 and the DVD drive on the IDE channel), reinstalled Vista (as it refused to boot with all the new hardware)got into Vista, saw everything, including the data from my parents hard drive. YAY!
Not so much, actually... because shortly after that the computer hard drive light would come on solid red and the computer would lock up. Reboot, shortly after booting up,same thing. Frustrated, I noticed on the Boot menu it now showed a new entry "Previous version of Windows". I chose that and BOOM! My parents hard drive booted up the computer just fine. I could also see all the other partitions on both drives. YAY! After mucking around in that a bit I decided to go back to my bootup. No dice, it wouldn't even boot anymore, As soon as it got to the Vista logo, hard drive light would light up solid and the machine would lock up.
I thought perhaps something was corrupted so my next thought was to take my Windows 7 partition that was just for testing anyhow, reformat it, and use THAT. Reformat the drive, install windows 7 and when it gets to the point where it saying "Setup is preparing to run windows 7 for the first time" hard drive light goes solid red, and it locks up. I then reset the machine boot back into my parent's XP setup, it works perfectly fine!
So now I'm baffled as to what is going on here, is it some odd SATA thing I'm missing? Could it be something else? Ideas? I'm very puzzled here. How come the XP that previously refused to boot is now booting but now my Vista and Windows 7 installed lock up while booting?
Parents computer, one I built about 6 mos. or so. all it would do was you go to boot up, it would complain about a corrupt boot.ini file, then go on to the Windows XP splash screen and then reboot, it would keep doing this, regardless of I booted from safe mode or not.
I tried to do a repair install of XP. It didn't even want to see the C: drive as a valid partition. After running chkdsk on it, I was able to get a directory listing from the repair console. However, now when I tried to boot I would get a "Disk Read error press ctrl-alt-del to continue" as soon it tried to boot from the hard drive. I know the data on there was still good so I didn't want to reformat before pulling the data off. So, I thought I would pull the hard drive from my currently dead desktop (motherboard failed, not had the fundage to replace it). Stick it in there and used that to retrieve the data. Stuck it in (Both SATA drives, parents drive on CH. 2 my drive on CH. 3 and the DVD drive on the IDE channel), reinstalled Vista (as it refused to boot with all the new hardware)got into Vista, saw everything, including the data from my parents hard drive. YAY!
Not so much, actually... because shortly after that the computer hard drive light would come on solid red and the computer would lock up. Reboot, shortly after booting up,same thing. Frustrated, I noticed on the Boot menu it now showed a new entry "Previous version of Windows". I chose that and BOOM! My parents hard drive booted up the computer just fine. I could also see all the other partitions on both drives. YAY! After mucking around in that a bit I decided to go back to my bootup. No dice, it wouldn't even boot anymore, As soon as it got to the Vista logo, hard drive light would light up solid and the machine would lock up.
I thought perhaps something was corrupted so my next thought was to take my Windows 7 partition that was just for testing anyhow, reformat it, and use THAT. Reformat the drive, install windows 7 and when it gets to the point where it saying "Setup is preparing to run windows 7 for the first time" hard drive light goes solid red, and it locks up. I then reset the machine boot back into my parent's XP setup, it works perfectly fine!
So now I'm baffled as to what is going on here, is it some odd SATA thing I'm missing? Could it be something else? Ideas? I'm very puzzled here. How come the XP that previously refused to boot is now booting but now my Vista and Windows 7 installed lock up while booting?