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My system drive failed and I'm trying to recover. I have another drive with a recent ghost copy of it, but I can't get this drive to boot. My bios reports that there's no system drive. I've gone into the recovery console and fiddled with the fixmbr, fixboot, and bootcfg commands, but no success.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Is it making any funny noises?

The drive that failed is history. The other drive with the ghost copy of the failed drive is working properly. It's just not being recognized as a boot drive. In the recovery console, bootcfg /list reports that there is a windows system on it and it gives the boot options (/fastdetect, etc.)

My real question is how can I get this drive to boot.

How is the ghosted drive configured? Is it IDE or SATA? If IDE, is it on the primary or secondary IDE connector (motherboard or controller card? RAID? SCSI?), is it jumpered as Master, Slave or Cable Select? I assume it's detected in the BIOS - if so, how are your boot/startup options configured in the BIOS?

It's IDE, set to primary master. Bios recognizes it, boot sequence is cd -> hdd00. (no floppy)

I actually got past the boot problem. I booted with a partition magic cd and it has something like a 'partition table editor'. I compared the boot sector on the drive in question w/ one on a working computer and there was a certain bit that had to be set. So I did and now the drive will almost boot.

Ghost reported a clean copy, but the copy doesn't quite make it all the way to windows. I get the big XP logo, then black screen, then mouse cursor, then two-tone blue screen with small xp logo. Then it hangs. Tried booting to safe-mode command prompt ( & assorted other options), but it still hangs in the same place every time. If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd be grateful.

I can go ahead and re-install XP. My only real concern is Half Life 2 and Steam. Anyone know if you can re-install HL2 on the same machine? I have a legit copy, but that Steam stuff seams more ominous and sinister than MS's activation procedure.

Steam's content protection is completely tied to the username/password, not to any copy of the data on your hard drive. Therefore, you can log on to Steam from any computer in the world and be able to download and play any games you have purchased.

You should be able to do a Repair install of Windows XP...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/usin ... oug92.mspx

I did the repair install, but something weird happened. Even though the recovery console identified my drive as c:, when windows finished the repair install, the drive showed up as d: -- and most of the apps don't work. I did have that drive set up as d: before I had this problem, but then I used norton ghost to copy the c: drive over to it. So even after the partition copy, windows still remembers that drive as d:. That's really inconvenient.

Unfortunately, you're not gonna be able to change it w/o reinstalling Windows. Sometimes if you have a second hard drive installed, this can happen, also Zip drives or card readers can cause this.

I formatted a new drive under XP as drive c: (I could do this since the system drive had been labeled d:) Then I coped the system drive onto c: and ran the repair install. After a few windows updates, I'm back to where I was before the disk failure.

The moral of the story is, once XP marks a drive with a letter, not even ghost can change it.

At least I learned a few things . . .


Thanks for your help.

Ain't Winders fun