Okay I will try to keep this breif and also show all of the attempts I exhausted before posting. This way I won%26#039;t get a flood of posts for stuff I did already.
XP MCE 2002 (pre SP2, before the domain BS they took out on 2005)
came pre-installed on Toshiba 5205-s705 laptop
1GB RAM
160GB HDD
2.4GHz P4
128MB nVidia
Okay.
PC working great for years.
I have 2 partitions. First on the drive is a FAT32 partition of 7.4GB and it%26#039;s the factory partition (ghost%26#039;d, hence the fat32. I had to have it Fat32 b/c of a boot manager)
It%26#039;s obviously PRIMARY
the 2nd partition is also a PRIMARY and is NTFS.
It%26#039;s the remaining 147GB and has the same factory install but much older and has a lot of stuff on it. It started off as the factory image however. (they (toshiba) give you a DVD that has a ghost image of the factory state)
Okay all that explained, it%26#039;s working fine. Nothing installed or changed. The next morning I power it on and get the invalid boot.ini message. It flashes VERY fast and reboots.
Here is what I have tried:
Uninstall boot manager - no change
Rconsoled the following:
fixboot
fixmbr
bootcfg /rebuild
manually copy a correct boot.ini using bartPE
NO CHANGE
This is definitely a partition related issue. maybe even MBR related. NOT a file related.
I also did these things...
(we%26#039;ll call the FAT32 partition Factory and the NTFS (faulty) partition Work)
I did a bartPE and changed the work to inactive and hidden
changed the factory to active and visible
booted. Got the multi os boot screen from IT%26#039;S boot.ini file. If I pick work it gives me the HAL.DLL error instead. (weird huh?) but if I pick Factory it boots just fine to windows.
If I unhide work and do the same, it is identical in behaviour except now when the factory one boots I can see the other drive (partition) and access all of the files just fine.
All of the bartPE bootdisks can see it.
If I try and do a repair install with a windows disc it sees the work
partition as %26quot;Unknown%26quot; and wants to do a destructive install rather than a repair install. (so it will only allow FORMAT of work partition)
weird stuff.
So then I tried CHKDSK /F and it didn%26#039;t find any problems with either partition.
I also tried drive commander, partition magic and PDT Doctor
and none of them see the problem and report all is A-OK
What
the
fark....???
So before BLASTING the damned drive and installing again and copying all that 120GB of crap back over and then re-installing the 30 or so apps, I was hoping to possibly fix what seems to be some mundane issue. I am sure it%26#039;s just a matter of some stupid bit on the mbr or Master Partition table or even the MFT (I%26#039;ve seen mft issues make a drive look physically dead) that needs adjusting.
My guess on how this happened is probably the boot manager screwed up somehow.
So the post is because I don%26#039;t know WHAT to do with the MBR, MFT or MPT in order to correct this issue.
Any ideas?|||I%26#039;m not quite sure; but among those options for fixmbr and the like, is there another one that would attempt to completely rewrite the MBR? When things get to this point, the easiest thing is probably just to nuke the thing, reformatting it and doing a full reformat, not a quick one, to check disk integrity.
I%26#039;d just back up everything (boot off a bartPE or linux livecd and drop things on an external).
By the way Ygg, if you check this, I doubt it was the OP who voted you thumbs down. Anyone who reads the question can vote.
