Broken Harddrive?

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XF8X

New Member
My Windows 7 took me into the recovery mode and did not do anything but sit at a screen so I uninstalled it...

Tried Ubuntu and got GRUB error 2 so uninstalled it...

Tried XP and got a missing NTLDR error...

Tried replacing IDE cable and freshly burnt discs and got nowhere...

edit: tried another harddrive, fixmbr, fixboot and rewriting the ntldr and ntdetect.com files

The harddrive comes up in BIOS and when installing OSs but I just keep getting errors...

Any suggestions?
Thx.
 
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I've actually already formatted one of the drives exactly like that and it didn't help. I also tried returning my BIOS to default settings...

There must be hope somewhere I just built this comp about a week ago if that...
 
I think I might be getting somewhere... I reinstalled XP on the 2nd harddrive I used and got a new error, I forget what and I'm not at home right now to check. I googled it and it said something about changing the jumper on my harddrive to master. That didn't help, in fact, it made my computer not see the harddrive at all...
 
XF8X said:
I think I might be getting somewhere... I reinstalled XP on the 2nd harddrive I used and got a new error, I forget what and I'm not at home right now to check. I googled it and it said something about changing the jumper on my harddrive to master. That didn't help, in fact, it made my computer not see the harddrive at all...
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is the jumper on your other primary device also listed as master? If thats the case change the jumper on the other device to slave and try again.
 
I have only been using one hard drive at a time

edit: and the dvd-drive does not have a jumper as it is a SATA drive
 
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yes. My only concern is that both of these drives are fairly old and my system is brand new, but still, I figured at least ONE of the drives would work... They come up in BIOS and the OS installs on them so they must not be dead
 
the errors are all on the mbr, maybe ur mbr is bad

have u tried the hard drives in different computers and did they work and are the errors always in ntldr/grub on both hard drives?
 
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no I have not tried them in different comps but yes the errors are always ntldr/grub on both drives.

keep in mind I have tried fixmbr and fixboot in the XP recovery console. I have read some things about the boot.ini but have not tried anything with that.

I also don't know how it could be the mbr as I have reformatted both drives (not the quick format) and the errors still show up
 
also, theres programs out there that'll test your hard drive, i used the hitachi drive fitness test and it worked good, id try running the test on each drive to see what the results are.
 
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ya, one of the harddrives is a Maxtor harddrive and I was going to try their test program but it is only for floppy drives is there a way to run it from usb?

I think I'm going to update my BIOS as soon as I get home and see if that solves the problem as well.
 
im not sure if there is, it doesnt say anything about it on their site, you could boot from cd if u can burn an one where ur at
 
ok when I go home I really want to try updating the BIOS first because I have a hunch... if that doesn't work then I will try burning the test software and checking my drives, I will post results later
 
ok so before I tried updating the BIOS I remembered about CHKDSK in the recovery console. I tried it 3 times and it froze every time during the repair...

I'm going to try updating the BIOS next...

EDIT: didn't update BIOS because I can't figure out how to do it without a floppy drive, I have lost my thumb drive and I couldn't figure out how to do it with a cd... I did try reinstalling Windows 7 since it was the only OS that worked for me, and it worked again... XP still does not work...
 
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mike pyne said:
Have you checked whether your hard disk is fine, because in most cases after the system being formatted, it easily get the OS installed, Now the matter that your are specifying seems that there is serious problem with your Hard disk. I request you to get it checked from the vendors.

Regards
Mike
Click to expand...

agreed
 
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