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Drive prevents booting as Slave

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, or any configuration? It all began when I received the fatal blue screen stating that my NTFS.SYS file was corrupted, windows simply would not boot. So I got a new hard drive and figured I would copy what I needed off the old SATA (WD120) drive. I installed the new drive Seagate 300 GB SATA, and windows, boots fine. Installed the old drive as a slave, won’t boot, remove the drive, system boots fine. I even copied the entire contents of the old drive to a secondary partition on the new drive, and unhooked the old drive, it still won’t boot, it either flashes the blue screen or perpetually reboots. There seems to be no way to access the files on the old drive, I ran a virus scan with no hits. The contents of the old drive seem to corrupt any drive they are on and take control of the system. Please advise

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Sounds as if your file system has become corrupted on the drive. Does the drive show any dead sectors when you scan it with a hard disk utility like chkdsk?

Try an in-place recovery of Windows.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

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No bad sectors, I have done every check I could think of do verified this drives integrity. Neither the Dell, Windows or WD utilities report any errors. I was thinking I could buy a SATA to IDE adapter and connect the drive to an external drive bay. But im looking for other options. The big surprise is when I copied the drive to a secondary partition of the new drive, which caused the new drive to inherit the same problems.

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Sounds likes the drive is dead.
It might be possible to access he drive by changing the drive order in BIOS to prevent it reading SATA drive first.

Also, you could try booting system up and then attaching the SATA drive and use Disk Management to rescan for new disks (not recommended but possible).

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I tried changing the drive order in the BIOS, regardless of what order the drive boots, I will either get a perpetual boot loop. or the NTFS.SYS blue screen, as long as the drive is activiated in Bios the problem occurs. All available diags report the drive as healthy, not even any bad sectors reported, its strange

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Well you have a few options the best would be to buy a USB to SATA Caddy and see if you can plug it in them and recover the data with the computer running that way it shouldn’t interfere with the Boot Sequence which appears to be what is happening here.

Failing that you’ll need to reformat the drive and use a Data Recovery Tool to recover your Data this is not cheap or fast. Ontrack have an excellent tool for this but it isn’t cheap you can have a look at

http://www.ontrack.com/software/

Or for a much cheaper option XWays has a tool called Davory which is about 40 Euros available to buy on line from

http://www.x-ways.net/davory/index-m.html

There is a Download option on this page but unless you buy the complete thing you’ll only be able to recover the first 200 K of any file. What you do is download the file check what it can recover and then if it suits your needs you can purchase the program and you’ll get a Registration Code E-Mailed to you which will activate the product.

If you use any of these options remember never to actually write anything at all to the drive with the data on it but save the recovered filed to a Folder that you have created on a different HDD.

Col

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OK, here is what is happening in our latest battle of ?The Lost Hard Disk?. I took a 200 GB IDE drive and attached it to the secondary IDE port of the mother board. The system recognized it after adjusting the bios settings. I then used a Seagate utility to copy the contents of the unusable hard drive to the IDE disk. It worked, Eureka !!, I then take the IDE drive and place it in a USB drive caddy, adjust my bios setting so only the one SATA drive is on and boots, the system starts without incident. I then plug in my USB caddy, the system recognized the caddy, and just before the drive letter appears the system reboots and begins its typical behavior all over again. Unreal.

Now as far as running a windows repair on the hard disk in question. I tried that; I could not get to the Windows sets up screen because anytime the hard disk is scanned in any way the system reboots. This leads me to the last option of formatting the disk and then recovering the information via utility, I am skeptical to this though, as if the data on the disk in causing reboots now, it will certainly do it again if the drive is formatted then recovered to another disk, Yes?

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You stated that you were able to copy the contents of the old drive to a 2nd partition on the new drive….how did you accomplish this…utility?

try this
http://www.sysinternals.com/FileAndDiskUtilities.html
they have utilities to access NTFS thru DOS…the older versions worked for me on a data recover job a few years ago…

Hope this helps…

Reply To: Drive prevents booting as Slave

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OK, here is what is happening in our latest battle of ?The Lost Hard Disk?. I took a 200 GB IDE drive and attached it to the secondary IDE port of the mother board. The system recognized it after adjusting the bios settings. I then used a Seagate utility to copy the contents of the unusable hard drive to the IDE disk. It worked, Eureka !!, I then take the IDE drive and place it in a USB drive caddy, adjust my bios setting so only the one SATA drive is on and boots, the system starts without incident. I then plug in my USB caddy, the system recognized the caddy, and just before the drive letter appears the system reboots and begins its typical behavior all over again. Unreal.

Now as far as running a windows repair on the hard disk in question. I tried that; I could not get to the Windows sets up screen because anytime the hard disk is scanned in any way the system reboots. This leads me to the last option of formatting the disk and then recovering the information via utility, I am skeptical to this though, as if the data on the disk in causing reboots now, it will certainly do it again if the drive is formatted then recovered to another disk, Yes?

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How did you copy old drive to partition on new drive? Imaging software? If so you may have two bootable partitions on the same drive causing confusion.

Dalton

Reply To: Drive prevents booting as Slave

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OK, here is what is happening in our latest battle of ?The Lost Hard Disk?. I took a 200 GB IDE drive and attached it to the secondary IDE port of the mother board. The system recognized it after adjusting the bios settings. I then used a Seagate utility to copy the contents of the unusable hard drive to the IDE disk. It worked, Eureka !!, I then take the IDE drive and place it in a USB drive caddy, adjust my bios setting so only the one SATA drive is on and boots, the system starts without incident. I then plug in my USB caddy, the system recognized the caddy, and just before the drive letter appears the system reboots and begins its typical behavior all over again. Unreal.

Now as far as running a windows repair on the hard disk in question. I tried that; I could not get to the Windows sets up screen because anytime the hard disk is scanned in any way the system reboots. This leads me to the last option of formatting the disk and then recovering the information via utility, I am skeptical to this though, as if the data on the disk in causing reboots now, it will certainly do it again if the drive is formatted then recovered to another disk, Yes?

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The problem is that, your old drive is still a master reboot, combining it with another master reboot is not a good idea. The solution is that put in the old drive, remove the new drive and then install the OS (on the old drive)and do a repair. After repairing it will boot fine, but then you cannot put in your new drive because it is also a master reboot. Confusing? But, there is a way around, put in the new drive, and then boot from the cd and then reformat the new drive.

Reply To: Drive prevents booting as Slave

In reply to Reply To: Drive prevents booting as Slave

OK, here is what is happening in our latest battle of ?The Lost Hard Disk?. I took a 200 GB IDE drive and attached it to the secondary IDE port of the mother board. The system recognized it after adjusting the bios settings. I then used a Seagate utility to copy the contents of the unusable hard drive to the IDE disk. It worked, Eureka !!, I then take the IDE drive and place it in a USB drive caddy, adjust my bios setting so only the one SATA drive is on and boots, the system starts without incident. I then plug in my USB caddy, the system recognized the caddy, and just before the drive letter appears the system reboots and begins its typical behavior all over again. Unreal.

Now as far as running a windows repair on the hard disk in question. I tried that; I could not get to the Windows sets up screen because anytime the hard disk is scanned in any way the system reboots. This leads me to the last option of formatting the disk and then recovering the information via utility, I am skeptical to this though, as if the data on the disk in causing reboots now, it will certainly do it again if the drive is formatted then recovered to another disk, Yes?

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Actually if you reformat and use Davory to recover the individual file types it shouldn’t be much of a problem. You can chose the file types to recover like JPEG, DOC, XLS or whatever you had installed and you will not be recovering the entire drive just some of the data on it and none of the CAB’s or DLL’s so effectively Windows shouldn’t spit the dummy when you recover the data.

Anyway they have a better description on how it works at

http://www.x-ways.net/davory/index-m.html

Where you can download a Trial Copy and see what is recoverable on the drive but this trial only allows the first 200 K to be recovered so if you are going to try recovering your data only you’ll need to pay for the registration I think it is somewhere around the 40 Euro mark so it is fairly cheep but it will not recover your system files.

Just read how you are supposed to use the product on the above URL and you’ll find it very hard to go wrong.

Once you have everything saved MAKE BACKUPS! It is really a lot easier the next time that something like this happens.

Col

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