Hard Drive BSOD Reboot or Hang

[Dan B]

My son's Windows XP Pro system fails to boot properly.

It boots up to the Windows screen, and then shows a BSOD briefly before restarting the boot process.

I've checked all the hardware, and everything points to the hard drive.

Western Digital WD40BB, NTFS, 1 partition, Windows XP Pro SP2

The system it is on, works fine with other drives and operating systems (DOS, 98, Win2000...)

When I try to repair the disk, (Booting from the XP CD or in safe mode), the system fails after mup.sys (.exe?)

Western Digital's disk utilities proclaim the disk is fine.

I've put the disk on a working windows 2000 system, but when it gets to the boot banner screen, it hangs that system. Even though that drive is a slave.

I'd rather not re-format and re-install all the OS and all the apps.

Any help would be appreciated.

[IcemanND]

I'm guessing that you don't know what the BSOD error is since you didn't post it. So I'll go out on a limb and guess that its a "Unmountable Boot Volume" error.

If this is the case and you have made no hardware changes, like to the IDE controller, this normally is indicative of a failing hard drive.

Boot from an XP cd and go to the repair console and run CHKDSK /R

This normally will get the system to bot again if it is not too bad. Afteerwards I recommend backing up data and imaging the drive to a new drive.

I have had MFG disk utilities detect no problems with the disk, then when I go to image it using Norton Ghost bad sectors are detected.

[trickytwista]

hey spinrite is a good toy 2 test hdds out..maybe worth a try

[Dan B]

The BSOD error comes up and is immediatly replaced with the boot screen as it forces a reboot of the system. You would need pretty good eyes to pick out the error code (well... at least better than mine).

I think this is a MBR problem of some sort (bad hardware or virus maybe?). That's all that I can figure, as the drive looks fine to the utilities, but as soon as windows 2000 or windows XP sees it, it hangs or reboots.

As a side note, I can't get to the Repair console. It hangs the system when trying that as well.

I'll see if I can't get the code before it leaves the screen.

And I'll see about "spinrite".

[LiquidSage]

http://cquirke.mvps.org/sp2intel.htm

[Dan B]

LiquidSage, It's an AMD Athlon processor, so it's not that issue.

[jaclaz]

I've put the disk on a working windows 2000 system, but when it gets to the boot banner screen, it hangs that system. Even though that drive is a slave.

I think this is a MBR problem of some sort (bad hardware or virus maybe?).

It "could" be the infamous corrupted MBR problem.

I have had this once, it seems like Win2k (and most probably XP as well ) need to find a "CLI" instruction in the MBR.

You can replace the MBR from a DOS/WIN9X boot diskette, with FDISK on it.

Download MBRWIZARD here:

http://mbrwizard.tripod.com/

and copy the dos mbrwizd.exe version to the diskette.

Boot from floppy, then at the dos prompt issue these commands (I am assuming you only have 1 Hard disk on the system):

mbrwizd /save=a:\ORI.MBR

(the above makes a copy of your original MBR.

fdisk /mbr

(the above re-writes a standard MBR)

If it does not work, please post the ORI.MBR file here as an attachment, I'll fix it and re-post it corrected.

jaclaz