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Solve : unable to access boot device, help needed (urgently), thank you? |
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Answer» Hi, I am unable to boot my Thinkpad T61 into Windows XP. This is my data-PC that is going offline at the end of this YEAR, so yes: I absolutely insist on keeping XP on it - just in case somebody is about to suggest moving on to Win 7 :-) (It is not an original XP-CD but a copy from a friend who made this for me for this explicit reason "in case something goes wrong").The xp operating system originally installed on your system, was it also a copy or was is it a genuine windows purchased from Microsoft?How come the reply that I posted disappeared after a couple of minutes ? Anyway: it was an OEM-version. The machine originally came with Vista, but the dealer did the downgrade to XP for me. He included a whole bunch of CDs, but none of them turned out to be an XP-CD, just tons of rescue and recovery media for both XP and Vista. But all they do is take me through to Lenovo Rescue & Recovery. Which is why I wanted an XP-CD "just in case". In any case, the bootable diskettes I made should do the trick. See this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1000 I also tried to run a Ubuntu live CD, which worked just fine.Yeah, well, not quite I posted my first reply, it was online for a couple of minutes and when I refreshed the page again it was gone, so I wrote another reply. Might have something to do with me being a newbie here ? Anyway, just deleted one of them. Quote from: Sydney on October 27, 2013, 04:49:02 AM Might have something to do with me being a newbie here ? No, it has nothing to do with you being a newbie. Unlike other places, we always treat all guests with respect. Haha, thank you Good to know :-)I would either check with another cd or another cd rom drive. Or you can use the OEM vista disk (if you have) just to be sure its not the xp disk. Also, If you have two RAM modules, remove one and check RAM with Memory module Test Burn it to a flash drive and boot your system with that flash drive, let it check till at least you get "pass complete no errors found" at the bottom of the screen". Perform this test on each RAM module by removing them and installing other. If one or both RAM modules are bad, then it is also responsible for corruption of data on the hard disk when it comes to installing an operating system.The memory is o.k. (Already checked the system with PC doctor, which is part of the Lenovo Rescue & Recovery package). I don't have a CD-ROM-drive that I can hook up to this machine, NEITHER can I get my hands on an original XP CD. I could purchase one on Monday but obviously that would not get delivered until Wednesday. I already checked. Which is why I went for the bootable diskettes. It would just seem like an unusual coincidence for both media (my CD and my disks) to fail the installation right at the same point (at the very end of the installation).... I do not have a Vista CD. I might be able to dig out a Windows 2000 CD, but then that is hardly going to enable me to repair my XP ? Hi Sydney, First things first don't waste any more time with the Hitachi drive it's dead. Please install the ssd back in the T60. Could you start the laptop up with the windows xp cd disk you have. And select rescue option follow the screen prompts to a command prompt. Use the flowing commands fdisk /fixboot fdisk /fixmbr If after either those commands you get invalid boot sector or boot sector cannot be written let me know for that next step. but as you are starting the repair you get to select the winodows folder those commands will get the drive booting. I'm concerned about how long it took to restore the ssd but we can work on that once it is booting. Lisamaree Quote from: Sydney on October 27, 2013, 03:31:08 AM Hi, I am unable to boot my Thinkpad T61 into Windows XP. This is my data-PC that is going offline at the end of this year, so yes: I absolutely insist on keeping XP on it -...Very detailed & excellent for a first time poster. I think your image is bad because some of the clusters are corrupted. I might have missed it, but did you run the hard drive diagnostics from the drive manufacturer? http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287#hitachi If the Hitachi doesn't work, the Seagate Seatools for DOS works on most drives. It's an ISO image to create a bootable CD. Don't run any diagnostics from Windows if Windows could be corrupt. Since you have an SSD with a likely corrupted restored image, install the SSD & attempt a Windows XP repair install: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htmComputer_Commando Why post further instructions when there is already things to try? Most people would look at the last post in their thread for the solution and maybe over look previous advice. Sydney please look at both Computer_Commando's and my advice above Thank you Lisa_maree Computer Commandos advice here is usually very solid... Further instructions i don't feel should be frowned upon...sometimes it's something like that which leads to a solution...which is what we do here. Don't be so hasty. Quote from: Lisa_maree on October 29, 2013, 04:55:32 PM ...Most people would look at the last post in their thread for the solution and maybe over look previous advice...That would be a mistake on their part. It's best to read everything. If the OP has a bad image created from a bad HDD, restoring to a new SSD won't make it work. He has 2 choices: 1. Perform a fresh install of Windows XP on the SSD. 2. Attempt a repair of the HDD, then create a good image. #1 should not take long, but MAY take a long time to reinstall all this programs, etc. #2 may take many hours depending on the size of the HDD. I've had Seatools run overnight on an 80GB HDD & still not fix it. I've had other tools take even longer & actually fix it where the manufacturer's wouldn't. However... OP said: "Tried to run XP from a CD, wanting to access the recovery console. For some strange reason, I don't get that option, just the option to re-install the operating system. (It is not an original XP-CD but a copy from a friend who made this for me for this explicit reason "in case something goes wrong"). The installation seems to work fine (both HD and SSD are recognized and the Windows-files get copied). Then, when the computer restarts, it only goes to the dark screen with the cursor again. Or, if I leave the CD in, it says to press any key to start from CD (again on a black screen)." This may indicate defective RAM. He needs to run memtest before proceeding with anything else. Quote .Most people would look at the last post in their thread for the solution and maybe over look previous advice... It would appear she maybe overlooked her own advice...Hi, thanks for your replies, everyone. And please do let me stress that I very much appreciate everyone's replies. The more ideas the better in this situation (especially since some replies were just plain wrong or had not taken into consideration all of the information I had provided). I still don't know what the cause of this conundrum was, but it was definitely not a hardware problem, the computer is up and running again with the same components. On top of whatever the cause of this was, the XP CD must have been bad (kudos to PCdoc). I was only able to sort this mess out once I purchased a new one. I wiped the HD, re-installed XP from the CD (kudos to Computer-Commando), then re-installed my Acronis backup and everything was fine (no more CHKDSK issues). Did the same thing with the SSD (also had to do a clean install from the XP CD before the Acronis re-install worked). Now the SSD is running equally well (had to align it, but that was easy enough with "Mini Tool Partition Wizard" and I will still tweak the BIOS, I have not gotten around to that yet). I am thinking that maybe something was wrong with the master boot record ?? Thankfully, someone also pointed me to a great HD-checking tool ("MHDD") which helped finding out the true state of my HD (fine). Those manufacturer's tools (Seatools, Hitachi etc) will return a "bad disk" result even if the disk is still fine, and one is left entirely in the dark as to what it is that that particular tool claims is wrong with the HD. There were 3 other things that I had tried that were not successful but that might help someone else: I checked the contacts inside the hard-drive slot and I reset the BIOS by removing the power plug, battery as well as the CMOS-battery. I also tried installing Windows 7 from a CD since it is available as a download and once I saw that that worked just fine, it was obvious that this was some sort of software rather than hardware issue (had to nuke the disk again before installing XP though in order to get rid of all those Win7 "leftovers). What I learned: 1) absolutely forget about HD manufacturer's tools to check their HDs. They're going to give you false positives without any details and when you phone the helpline all they are going to do is try sell you a new one. 2) If you cannot access the HD but it does show in the BIOS, nuke your disk, then do a clean install of your OS and THEN restore an Acronis update. I hope that this is going to help someone else at some stage :-) Cheers, and thanks again for the warm welcome ! |
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