help! i can only boot in safe mode

[DougMcDonald]

Are you able to detect the drive in the BIOS?

I had an issue where I could see in bios and not in windows. As previously suggested by somewhere, re-seat the cables to your HDD and autodetect the drives via the bios.

If the drive shows up, then chances are it still lives in some shape or form!

[kalniel]

Boot in safe mode then run msconfig. Choose selective startup and disable all non-microsoft services.

If this fixes it, enable non-ms ones one by one to see where the problem is.

[rektek]

Are you able to detect the drive in the BIOS?

I had an issue where I could see in bios and not in windows. As previously suggested by somewhere, re-seat the cables to your HDD and autodetect the drives via the bios.

If the drive shows up, then chances are it still lives in some shape or form!

sorry for my newbieness, but how can i detect it in bios?
i went into bios, but not sure where to check for the drive...
i found the area where you have options for:
primary master, primary slave, secondary master and secondary slave, but going through the pageup/down options only lets me choose from: auto, user, and numbers ranging from 1 to 46

i should also mention that when i first turn the machine on, DOS detects the drive as always

[rektek]

Boot in safe mode then run msconfig. Choose selective startup and disable all non-microsoft services.

If this fixes it, enable non-ms ones one by one to see where the problem is.

r u refering to the usb-key driver issue?
or the hard drive issue?

[kalniel]

Any issues where you can boot into safe mode but not normal windows.

(As an aside, please use proper english here - 'r u' and lack of capitals makes posts hard to read.)

[rektek]

well, after further tweaking, i am able to boot in 'normal mode' but it takes a LONG time (almost 10 monutes!)

i tried unplugging drives to isolate the problem:

first i unplugged (power and ide) of the secondary/slave (the one that seems dead) drive and windows would not boot at all!
just stayed in DOS, and did NOT detect either drive

then just for kicks, i plugged that one back in, and unplugged the main (system) drive, and just as suspected; windows did not boot but DOS did detect the slave drive

so why does unplugging the slave drive make the main one not be detected even by DOS?

i should also add that when both drives are plugged in, they are both detected by DOS, but only main drive is seen by windows.

this further makes me think it is a virus and/or bad driver causing problems

--

should i still run msconfig?
and if yes, then which boxes shoud i have checked/unchecked

thanx!

[rektek]

im loosing my head over this.

now my computer is useless:

i completely removed the problematic slave drive, and cannot boot into windows at all.

instead it just remains in DOS and after a few minutes shows nothing but a full page of slashes! (/)

why would removing the slave disable me from booting the main drive????

seems like i need to have the bad/slave drive installed (even though it is not detected by windows) in order to boot the main.

really weird.

IF I CHOOSE "cable select" on the slave drive, do both drives have to be set to this? (or is it ok to have the main drive set to master and the slave to "CS"?)

[Thorsson]

Don't use Cable Select. Main drive should be set to Master and other to Slave.

Sounds to me like you might have a dodgy cable.

[rektek]

i tried another cable and no go.

also tried putting problem drive into a firewire enclosure with another computer and although i got a "found maxtor device" popup, i could not access the contents of the drive

[DougMcDonald]

Sounds like the boot records may be corrupt. This can happen when fiddling with device jumper settings.

I had a problem years ago along these lines where a drive name came up with a load of symbols.

Disconnect you slave drive, and just plug your main drive in, using the 'master' option on the jumpers.

Then try going into safe mode (F8 on bootup normally) and select 'boot to dos prompt', then do 'fixmbr' on the drive in question (bit of a long shot) but it should clear any crappy boot stuff and hopefully get it back to a bootable state.

When this is complete, boot back into windows and ensure you copy off any valuable data.

Then power off, connect your slave drive, selected as slave on the jumpers and boot to safe mode again.

When here, ensure you can use c: and d: to switch between drives. If you can do this, do a 'dir' to ensure the contents of the d: drive are indeed those of your slave drive.
If satisfied, do the 'fixmbr' thing again, and hopefully this will make windows detect it properly again.

Boot to windows normally, and see what happens, hope it helps...let me know how you get on...

[Supershanks]

If the drive is formatted in ntfs it won't be recognised in dos. use your xpo cd boot from that & use recovery console
see Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console
try :-
chkdsk
fixmbr
fixboot

if you type the command & add /? you will see the options.

luck

[DougMcDonald]

Yeah good point shanks, been a while since i was messing about in boot records

I was speaking to a mate up here who implied that fixmbr etc would not be available on ntfs formatted drives anyway, because they don't have one.

Repair console looks like the only option really

[Supershanks]

Your probably right about fixmbr. I've used recovery console in the past to sort out an xp install where boot had been set to another drive( Installation drive wasn't the 1st drive so xp makes 1st drive boot, so os becomes D:\)
I followed this Warning!! #2
If the Repair Option is not Available which works a treat. something along the same lines after chkdsk may work here.

[rektek]

thanx for the help everyone, maybe ill try to muck around in DOS when i have some time, but since im doing 70 - 80 hours a week at work right now, itll probably have to wait (as this sounds like full day's work)

[Lucio]

Out of interest, without that second hard drive in place, does your system boot properly?

If so then the drive is definately dead because I remember reading somewhere that having a faulty HDD on IDE interface causes big problems with boot speeds.