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Hard Drive configuration error help

3K views 10 replies 3 participants last post by  raptor_pa 
#1 ·
Hey. So one of my hard drives is officially ballsed up, speedfan wants it replaced and diagnostic tools give up on it, as does checkdisk haha.

So anyway...i decided to remove it seeing as, well, it has nothing all that important on it anyway so its no loss, i can get back all my games etc.

But i ran into a problem after disconnecting it, on boot up, just before the windows scrolling bar logo thingy (you know what i mean)

It comes up with an error (white text black screen) along the lines of:

"Could not find boot something something, hard disk hardware configuration error something, please use correct boot device something" or sort of like that. :4-dontkno

Anyone any ideas?

I tried playing with the disk priorities in bios but it didnt help.

Then when i connected it up again...i found that it had "switched" the letters around and couldnt find E:\ which has windows on it.

So the question is...could that be an issue? Or is it something else?

Should i try formatting the harddrive? All i want to do is disable or remove the bloody thing because (On the current computer as we speak) its slowing it down considerably and ever 3 seconds its making an "activity" sound, like a pulse of buzzing ness lol.

Maybe i have to do more in the bios?

The fault is on my WD250GB drive, the others i have are another WD80GB drive and a samsung 80 gig drive

Thanks in advance.
 
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#4 ·
Were booth disks in the machine when you installed windows? What position was this drive ( SATA-0 SATA-1 etc or if IDE Primary Master, Primary Slave etc ) It sounds like the boot code may have been written to the failed drive, this is the code - written to the highest priority drive - which points to the windows start up code, no matter which drive your windows is actually loaded onto, the boot strap will always be on the highest priority ( lowest SATA port or Primary Master IDE ) You can try a repair install of Windows with the failed drive removed and see if it will recognize the current install and rebuild the boot loader on that disk.
 
#5 ·
Hmmmm...what about the "fixboot" commands in recovery console, could i do that?

Oh ummm...the 250gb is "2nd" priority in bios, its not primary i think as it has no jumper thingies on it, and yeah all 3 HD's were installed.

Why the heck would it write to another HD? MADNESS! xD.

Right i'll do what you suggested, but theres nothing wrong with my windows install...hmmm

Just to repeat, do you reckon i could try the "fixboot" option in recovery console? If so, how would i go about doing that?

Thanks for help so far.
 
#6 ·
You could try fixboot, it may work. The reason the boot loader is written to the first physical disk, is the BIOS has no idea what OS you want to load. Windows, Linux etc all use slightly different boot code, and that code changes between versions. So in order for the computer to be able to start the boot loader for ANY OS is always written to the same physical location of the first physical hard disk. That way the BIOS can go to a specific point and begin executing the code that is located there, then it can find the OS no matter where it is installed and no matter what OS it is. It's what allows us to dual boot systems, load the OS on a different disk etc, it enables lots of flexibility. Are these IDE or SATA drive?
 
#9 ·
So ummm...run fixboot or fixmbr then fixboot, on the drive that has my XP installed on yes?

Also...doing this wont effect things like installed programs on on E or C (my ok drives) or mess and services up like bluetooth, rivatuner, or steam or anti virus like that will it? Or will i need to re-install registry entries or am i just being silly?

lol :p
 
#10 · (Edited)
Bump

Ok right, fixboot didnt work...and running fixmbr gave the warning of it damaging partitions and all that, so i didnt do it ><.

Should i go ahead an re-do the MBR on (whith the faulting harddrive removed, E: now become D: lol) D: then run fixboot and I should be fine? Or is there another issue at work?

Is there anything i can maybe do with the BOOT.INI in "msconfig" system config untility to fix this?
 
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