I am troubled that CD will only boot when Hard Disk is in Auto. Auto
should select CHA, LBA, or Large, and boot successfully. I assume the
numbers for cylinder, head, and sectors are same in Auto as in LBA,
Large, etc? When that same auto setting is selected manually, then CD
again should boot. That is troubling AND is related to the part of the
boot process that is not working properly.

Was this disk ever used or setup with a disk setup utility from
(forgot which one WD uses) Microhouse Ez-Drive or OnTracks Ez-BIOS (or
equivalent). If so, that special Bios Extender software must be
removed with the appropriate driver OR disk must be low level formatted
if manufacturer provides that option (on diagnostic disk). I have
never fully understood how these Bios extenders work, but have seen
them make drives do strange things on booting. Those Bios Extenders
must be removed by the correct version. Maxtors version was called
Max-Blast. Again, I forgot what WD called theirs, but it is the only
other thing I can think of that would cause MBR program to not find and
read files from root directory.

Maybe look at dates on NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, Boot.ini, etc to verify
these files were overwritten when you last thought they were. I can
tell you what it is not doing.

Boot from CD-Rom and exectue a Disk Degramenter in a hope that the
boot files can be relocated where they are more easily found by Boot
Sector program.

Normally when in your position, I then write assembly code and load
DOS to read the boot sector, etc. Task is too complex to explain here.

Meanwhile, other programs (besides fixmbr and fix boot) availabe (but
typically not relevent to this problem) include diskpart and bootcfg.
But again, I am troubled that drive can be read in Auto but not in same
mode selected manually.

wrote:
I will start with the BIOS settings.

It has been set to Auto through all of this.
I tried all of the following settings:
CHA
LBA
Large

Other Auto detected settings:
Capacity: 40016 MB
Cylinder: 1277
Head: 240
Precomp: 0
Landing Zone: 19157
Sector: 255

After each change, I booted into the Recovery Console and ran fixmbr
and fixboot, then restarted and removed the Windows CD.

Still got the same error with all three settings.

The error comes after it shows either:
Building DMI Pool.....
Verifiying DMI Pool Data............Update Success

The computer would not boot with the CD until I set it back to Auto.

Disk Management:

Volume: (C
Layout: Partition
Type: Basic
File System: NTFS
Status: Healthy (System)
Capacity: 37.26 GB
Free Space: 35.95 GB
% Free: 96%
Fault Tolerance: No
Overhead: 0%

Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)

Nothing notable in the System Log.

System Files on the C: Drive:
AUTOEXEC.BAT
boot.ini
CONFIG.SYS
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
NTDETECT.COM
ntldr
pagefile.sys

Anything else?


w_tom wrote:
Disk Manager (from Windows NT and 2000) is now called Disk
Management. It is part of Computer Management. A quick way to load
Computer Management: enter in StartRun the command compmgmt.msc .

This provides a check list of what actually exists. Confirm what you
thought with what the computer says exists. That partition (the only
partition and should be NTFS) should be the active partition, healthy,
etc

Other information that, in your case should not report anything
useful (but worth checking) is System Log of Event Viewer.

Your boot.ini file is would also tell boot loader program to load
those other files from first partition - reads correctly. But
apparently (from what I understand), you are not even getting the boot
loader to read boot.ini file; meaning again that the boot loader is
not finding and loading any files from the root directory. If boot.ini
file was read, then the text (WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home) would
be seen on screen.

If necessary files NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, Boot.ini exist and the boot
loader is confirmed OK (overwritten) by the Recover Console and that
partition is marked active, then only reason left for boot loader not
able to find those root directory files is a CMOS setting that is not
quite right for that drive. For example, words such as LBA or Normal
if mis-selected in CMOS would cause only part of the drive to be
readable during boot. A changed selection can mean that some files in
the root directory cannot be found by boot loader. When booted from
CD-Rom, the configuration setting may be ignored which is why booting
from CD-Rom can see same hard drive files just fine.

Although those voltages would cause me to perform further testing
(because 12 volts is so low while 5 volts is high), still, those
voltages are sufficient and would not cause a boot failure. Sometime
later, when system is accessing multiple peripherals simultaneously
(multitasking programs accessing hard drive, CD-Rom, floppy, network
and doing graphics), I would check those voltages again just to be
sure. Meanwhile, no reason to do any hardware changes. CPU will
either work - execute the WD diagnostic - or completely fail. Swapping
hardware may only complicate problems.

(BTW the Seagate with error code 78? means the XP on the Seagate is
for hardware different from what your motherboard contains. A HAL
layer in NT make NT unique for each computer chipset.)

We know files exist on root directory. We know boot.ini has correct
information. We know the boot loader does not read those root
directory files. That is the point where failure is happening. We
know disk hardware is OK. Question is why boot loader will not see
those files. (I believe the wording for the 'not booting' message is
directly from the Boot Loader meaning the boot loader did execute.)
Either CMOS setting for drive is not correct, or boot loader is not
properly written with parameters unique to that drive (maybe written
before CMOS setting somehow changed?), or disk is not active so that
boot loader does not know what partition to look for a root directory.

Hardware is working just fine. Something in your setup or parameters
written uniquely for the boot loader are causing boot loader to not
find root directory files. Try booting with different CMOS selections
for that drive. Confirm for active partition. Rewrite boot loader
program to disk boot sector using Recovery Console.

wrote:
-Disk Manager: Are you talking about the Disk Management tools within
Windows?

-Boot.ini Contents:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home
Edition" /fastdetect

-PS Voltages:
12V: 11.85V
5V: 5.13V
3.3V: 3.39V

Anything else?