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
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