General_Tso Posted July 26, 2006 Report Share Posted July 26, 2006 Hello, folks.I have a Dell Dimension 8200, which failed to boot. At start up, Windows XP would not boot but instead a message would appear saying to hit F1 to setup or F2 to continue. (I cannot remember what the exact message was, but I believe it was something regarding the MBR.) What would cause such an error?I booted from a Knoppix Live CD, and it couldn't see the hard drive. Next, I tried the Ultimate Boot CD and launched TestDisk 6.2. I was able to see the hard drive, and I analyzed the hard drive and saved. From there, I restarted and booted to my first hard drive using UBCD. Then, I was able to use "safe mode," which froze, so I tried "last known good configuration," and it worked. I was able to boot Windows XP and all seems fine. Could the drive be going bad? Any other possibilities?Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb Posted July 27, 2006 Report Share Posted July 27, 2006 Hello, and welcome to the Windows forum!Since you were able to boot to last known good configuration, I would assume that it was some corrupted data that prevented you form booting previously. But the last know good config seems to have repaired it, so I would not suspect hardware failure.Nevertheless, do take a full backup - just in case, and also try to locate and run diagnostic utilities from your HD manufacturer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
General_Tso Posted August 1, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 1, 2006 Thanks for the post and the welcome. Since I posted, I also used bootcfg from the command line to make sure the boot perimeters were set up and all seems well. The corruption seems to have been on my MBR. I did two hard drive tests, one with Maxtor's Maxblast tool and another with HDTune on the UBCD4Win CD, and there were no errors or bad blocks. At this point, I'm willing to assume the hard drive is alive and well.I appreciate the input! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
General_Tso Posted August 7, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 7, 2006 The machine in question worked fine for a couple more days, and it returned to the similar unbootable condition. At this point, I'm stumped. I'm going to store the computer until I have a chance to swap another hard drive into it. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd appreciate them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-pops- Posted August 8, 2006 Report Share Posted August 8, 2006 I'm assuming you don't have a backup of this system.If the machine contains anything of importance and you manage to get it going again, ensure that the first thing you do is to make a full system backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
General_Tso Posted August 8, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 8, 2006 I backed up the system when I got it working again, and everything has been restored to a replacement machine. My concern now is diagnosing the problem and fixing the problem-child computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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