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Interesting (At Least To Me) Boot Failure

A

Arthur Shapiro

Flightless Bird
My oldest laptop, an IBM T20, destabilized and was found to have substantial
disk corruption. This was tracked down to a bad memory SODIMM, which was
consistently mangling two contiguous bits. It's now on the bus back to
Crucial for a replacement - I'm impressed they even stock PC100 these days.
The disk passed the Hitachi Drive Fitness test, so I'm certain this was the
root cause.

I did a restore from my Windows Home Server machine. While this sometimes
works, often it doesn't - the bare-metal restore is really iffy on this
otherwise fine product.

I ended up with a non-bootable disk - the usual blinking cursor after POST.
FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the repair console did nothing.

I confirmed that I could do a reinstall of Windows XP Pro without incident,
but of course would lose all the installed programs. WHS restores
consistently resulted in the blinking cursor failure.

I found that if I copied Boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to a non-bootable
floppy, and forced the T20 to boot from floppy, Windows came up perfectly fine
on the machine. So this would seem to indicate a disk structure problem,
which FIXMBR should have repaired but didn't.

Does anyone have any wild ideas how to get this guy to boot from the disk?
Obviously booting from floppies is a horrible kludge, awkward as can be, and
floppies and floppy drives are no longer the epitome of reliability.

Art
 
P

Pegasus [MVP]

Flightless Bird
"Arthur Shapiro" <art.shapiro@unisys.com> wrote in message
news:i5gkte$18s2$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...
> My oldest laptop, an IBM T20, destabilized and was found to have
> substantial
> disk corruption. This was tracked down to a bad memory SODIMM, which was
> consistently mangling two contiguous bits. It's now on the bus back to
> Crucial for a replacement - I'm impressed they even stock PC100 these
> days.
> The disk passed the Hitachi Drive Fitness test, so I'm certain this was
> the
> root cause.
>
> I did a restore from my Windows Home Server machine. While this sometimes
> works, often it doesn't - the bare-metal restore is really iffy on this
> otherwise fine product.
>
> I ended up with a non-bootable disk - the usual blinking cursor after
> POST.
> FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the repair console did nothing.
>
> I confirmed that I could do a reinstall of Windows XP Pro without
> incident,
> but of course would lose all the installed programs. WHS restores
> consistently resulted in the blinking cursor failure.
>
> I found that if I copied Boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to a
> non-bootable
> floppy, and forced the T20 to boot from floppy, Windows came up perfectly
> fine
> on the machine. So this would seem to indicate a disk structure problem,
> which FIXMBR should have repaired but didn't.
>
> Does anyone have any wild ideas how to get this guy to boot from the disk?
> Obviously booting from floppies is a horrible kludge, awkward as can be,
> and
> floppies and floppy drives are no longer the epitome of reliability.
>
> Art
>


The blinking cursor is usually the result of the boot partition not being
marked active. Run diskmgmt.msc, then right-click drive C: and set it to
"active".
 
E

Elmo

Flightless Bird
Arthur Shapiro wrote:
> My oldest laptop, an IBM T20, destabilized and was found to have substantial
> disk corruption. This was tracked down to a bad memory SODIMM, which was
> consistently mangling two contiguous bits. It's now on the bus back to
> Crucial for a replacement - I'm impressed they even stock PC100 these days.
> The disk passed the Hitachi Drive Fitness test, so I'm certain this was the
> root cause.
>
> I did a restore from my Windows Home Server machine. While this sometimes
> works, often it doesn't - the bare-metal restore is really iffy on this
> otherwise fine product.
>
> I ended up with a non-bootable disk - the usual blinking cursor after POST.
> FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the repair console did nothing.
>
> I confirmed that I could do a reinstall of Windows XP Pro without incident,
> but of course would lose all the installed programs. WHS restores
> consistently resulted in the blinking cursor failure.
>
> I found that if I copied Boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to a non-bootable
> floppy, and forced the T20 to boot from floppy, Windows came up perfectly fine
> on the machine. So this would seem to indicate a disk structure problem,
> which FIXMBR should have repaired but didn't.
>
> Does anyone have any wild ideas how to get this guy to boot from the disk?
> Obviously booting from floppies is a horrible kludge, awkward as can be, and
> floppies and floppy drives are no longer the epitome of reliability.
>
> Art


If all else fails use a BartPE CD or any of the Knoppix Live CD's to
copy data to another drive before reinstalling.

--

Joe =o)
 
A

Art Shapiro

Flightless Bird
On 8/30/2010 11:32 AM, Pegasus [MVP] wrote:

> The blinking cursor is usually the result of the boot partition not
> being marked active. Run diskmgmt.msc, then right-click drive C: and set
> it to "active".


With appreciation, the single partition on C: is marked as the active
one. But thanks.

Art
 
A

Art Shapiro

Flightless Bird
On 8/30/2010 2:14 PM, Elmo wrote:

>
> If all else fails use a BartPE CD or any of the Knoppix Live CD's to
> copy data to another drive before reinstalling.
>


I have the data safely backed up with Windows Home Server - I'm just
hoping to avoid all the nuisance asoociated with reinstalling an OS on a
laptop - all the programs, the IBM-specific drivers and utilities, etc.,
etc. But thanks for your suggestion, which for most folks would be
quite reasonable.

I'm also somewhat irked at not being able to noodle this one out.

Art
 
P

Pegasus [MVP]

Flightless Bird
"Art Shapiro" <arthur-temp-3@cox.net> wrote in message
news:i5hjgl$9n$1@news.eternal-september.org...
> On 8/30/2010 11:32 AM, Pegasus [MVP] wrote:
>
>> The blinking cursor is usually the result of the boot partition not
>> being marked active. Run diskmgmt.msc, then right-click drive C: and set
>> it to "active".

>
> With appreciation, the single partition on C: is marked as the active one.
> But thanks.
>
> Art


I am aware that you ran fixmbr but since it did not have the desired effect,
why not try this:
- Create a DOS boot diskette, e.g. from www.bootdisk.com.
- Make sure that fdisk.com (exe?) is on the disk.
- Boot the machine with this diskette.
- Run the command fdisk /MBR. It will regardless of your file system
(FAT32/NTFS)
- Run fdisk again and mark the single partition as active.
 
A

Arthur Shapiro

Flightless Bird
In article <OkRun1NSLHA.5732@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl>, "Pegasus [MVP]" <news@microsoft.com> wrote:
>


>I am aware that you ran fixmbr but since it did not have the desired effect,
>why not try this:
>- Create a DOS boot diskette, e.g. from www.bootdisk.com.
>- Make sure that fdisk.com (exe?) is on the disk.
>- Boot the machine with this diskette.
>- Run the command fdisk /MBR. It will regardless of your file system
>(FAT32/NTFS)
>- Run fdisk again and mark the single partition as active.
>

Well, not good:

The 6.22 DOS from bootdisk.com wouldn't correctly run - looks like a problem
with the executable. But I was able to make a 6.21 floppy after finally
finding a floppy that would format. That's getting harder and harder to do.

I ran the fdisk /MBR without incident, although as you noted it was oblivious
to the NTFS file system.

Upon attempting to set the partition as active, it reported that the partition
already was active. I didn't see any way to unmark it without deleting the
partition itself.

Reboot to the disk now gives "a disk read error occurred", rather than
the blinking cursor, which I suspect has to do with NTLDR. I can still boot
to the non-system floppy.

I don't live too many miles from the ocean - have you ever flung a laptop off
a pier???

Art
E
 
P

Pegasus [MVP]

Flightless Bird
"Arthur Shapiro" <art.shapiro@unisys.com> wrote in message
news:i5jcfr$2se0$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...
> In article <OkRun1NSLHA.5732@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl>, "Pegasus [MVP]"
> <news@microsoft.com> wrote:
>>

>
>>I am aware that you ran fixmbr but since it did not have the desired
>>effect,
>>why not try this:
>>- Create a DOS boot diskette, e.g. from www.bootdisk.com.
>>- Make sure that fdisk.com (exe?) is on the disk.
>>- Boot the machine with this diskette.
>>- Run the command fdisk /MBR. It will regardless of your file system
>>(FAT32/NTFS)
>>- Run fdisk again and mark the single partition as active.
>>

> Well, not good:
>
> The 6.22 DOS from bootdisk.com wouldn't correctly run - looks like a
> problem
> with the executable. But I was able to make a 6.21 floppy after finally
> finding a floppy that would format. That's getting harder and harder to
> do.
>
> I ran the fdisk /MBR without incident, although as you noted it was
> oblivious
> to the NTFS file system.
>
> Upon attempting to set the partition as active, it reported that the
> partition
> already was active. I didn't see any way to unmark it without deleting
> the
> partition itself.
>
> Reboot to the disk now gives "a disk read error occurred", rather than
> the blinking cursor, which I suspect has to do with NTLDR. I can still
> boot
> to the non-system floppy.
>
> I don't live too many miles from the ocean - have you ever flung a laptop
> off
> a pier???
>
> Art
> E


We're getting closer. A missing ntldr file cannot possible generate a disk
read error. It sounds as if you had some bad clusers on your disk. The event
viewer (eventvwr.exe) would tell you more.

Where to from here? I would do this:
- Boot into Windows
- Run chkdsk c: /r
- Make sure the hidden files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini are in place.
- Perhaps run fixboot and fixmbr again.

Please let me know when you're about to chuck the laptop out of the window
so that I can stand below and catch it before you cop a fine for littering.
 
A

Arthur Shapiro

Flightless Bird
In article <OMBOOZUSLHA.2068@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>, "Pegasus [MVP]" <news@microsoft.com> wrote:

>We're getting closer. A missing ntldr file cannot possible generate a disk
>read error. It sounds as if you had some bad clusers on your disk. The event
>viewer (eventvwr.exe) would tell you more.
>
>Where to from here? I would do this:
>- Boot into Windows
>- Run chkdsk c: /r
>- Make sure the hidden files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini are in place.
>- Perhaps run fixboot and fixmbr again.
>

Chkdsk came out clean. The three files were there, fc-ed without incident to
their equivalents on the non-bootable floppy, and were appropriately
attrib-ed.

Booted into an XP CD, and ran fixboot and fixmbr.

We're now back to the blinking cursor.

I am about to search eBay for an affordable trebuchet.

This is so obviously a software issue related to the basic disk structure, and
I don't have enough tools at my disposal to deal with it.

Art
 
P

Pegasus [MVP]

Flightless Bird
"Arthur Shapiro" <art.shapiro@unisys.com> wrote in message
news:i5k0tc$7rn$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...
> In article <OMBOOZUSLHA.2068@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>, "Pegasus [MVP]"
> <news@microsoft.com> wrote:
>
>>We're getting closer. A missing ntldr file cannot possible generate a disk
>>read error. It sounds as if you had some bad clusers on your disk. The
>>event
>>viewer (eventvwr.exe) would tell you more.
>>
>>Where to from here? I would do this:
>>- Boot into Windows
>>- Run chkdsk c: /r
>>- Make sure the hidden files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini are in
>>place.
>>- Perhaps run fixboot and fixmbr again.
>>

> Chkdsk came out clean. The three files were there, fc-ed without incident
> to
> their equivalents on the non-bootable floppy, and were appropriately
> attrib-ed.
>
> Booted into an XP CD, and ran fixboot and fixmbr.
>
> We're now back to the blinking cursor.
>
> I am about to search eBay for an affordable trebuchet.
>
> This is so obviously a software issue related to the basic disk structure,
> and
> I don't have enough tools at my disposal to deal with it.
>
> Art
>


What does the Event Viewer tell you? If you had a disk read error then it
will be recorded there.

To deal with disk read errors you should download and run the diagnostic
program that the disk manufacturer has on his home site. If you do not know
who made the disk then this program should tell you. Save it as
c:/Diskparms.vbs, then double-click it.

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:/\.\root\CIMV2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery( _
"SELECT * FROM Win32_DiskDrive",,48)
sReply = ""
For Each objItem in colItems
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Manufacturer: " & objItem.Caption
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Size: " & int(objItem.Size / 1000 /
1000 / 1000) & " GBytes"
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Partitions: " & objItem.Partitions
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Sectors: " &
FormatNumber(objItem.TotalSectors, 0, 0, 0, -1)
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Heads: " & objItem.TotalHeads
sReply = sReply & vbLF & "Cylinders: " &
FormatNumber(objItem.TotalCylinders, 0, 0, 0, -1)
msgbox sReply, 0, "Disk Drive Properties"
Next
 
R

Randem

Flightless Bird
A few questions:

1 - Is this a replacement drive for the original that came with the laptop?

2 - How big is the drive?

--
The Top Script Generator for Jordan Russell's Inno Setup -
http://www.randem.com/innoscript.html
Free Utilities and Code - http://www.randem.com/freesoftutil.html
"Arthur Shapiro" <art.shapiro@unisys.com> wrote in message
news:i5gkte$18s2$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...
> My oldest laptop, an IBM T20, destabilized and was found to have
> substantial
> disk corruption. This was tracked down to a bad memory SODIMM, which was
> consistently mangling two contiguous bits. It's now on the bus back to
> Crucial for a replacement - I'm impressed they even stock PC100 these
> days.
> The disk passed the Hitachi Drive Fitness test, so I'm certain this was
> the
> root cause.
>
> I did a restore from my Windows Home Server machine. While this sometimes
> works, often it doesn't - the bare-metal restore is really iffy on this
> otherwise fine product.
>
> I ended up with a non-bootable disk - the usual blinking cursor after
> POST.
> FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the repair console did nothing.
>
> I confirmed that I could do a reinstall of Windows XP Pro without
> incident,
> but of course would lose all the installed programs. WHS restores
> consistently resulted in the blinking cursor failure.
>
> I found that if I copied Boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to a
> non-bootable
> floppy, and forced the T20 to boot from floppy, Windows came up perfectly
> fine
> on the machine. So this would seem to indicate a disk structure problem,
> which FIXMBR should have repaired but didn't.
>
> Does anyone have any wild ideas how to get this guy to boot from the disk?
> Obviously booting from floppies is a horrible kludge, awkward as can be,
> and
> floppies and floppy drives are no longer the epitome of reliability.
>
> Art
>
 
A

Art Shapiro

Flightless Bird
On 9/2/2010 12:59 AM, Randem wrote:
> A few questions:
>
> 1 - Is this a replacement drive for the original that came with the laptop?
>
> 2 - How big is the drive?
>

This is a replacement 20 Gig Hitachi drive, a number of years old, which
passed the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test on its most stringent test when
all this started. (That was considered an excellent drive at the time I
purchased it.) You can laugh how it replaced the stock 6 Gigger!

With respect to Pegasus' suggestion about the event viewer: I never had
the opportunity to check. I had been playing around with various MBR
restoration tools, and even tried using Partition Magic to make a tiny
second partition, in hopes that this would cause the disk structure in
question to be coincidentally corrected. (Nope!)

Suddenly I couldn't boot off of the non-Dos floppy, with the assertion
being that the hardware abstraction layer (HAL.DLL) was corrupted.

At that point I decided I'd spent far too many hours on a laptop worth
about $50, and I just fresh-installed XP and installed a few of the
programs I needed. It's up and running, for the little bit of use it
will ever get these days.

The root cause is incorrect behavior of Windows Home Server; I had
exactly the same issue on my main desktop machine (Win7 X64) when one of
the two Raid-0 disks failed and I had to do a bare-metal restore. Other
times, naturally in a non-critical test sequence, I've had WHS
restorations work perfectly. Apparently it only fails when the
restoration is due to a real failure - pretty irritating artificial
intelligence.

Thanks for all the assistance - despite not panning out I'm grateful. I
can always reproduce the failure on a spare drive if I ever want to
abuse myself.

Art
 
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