Is my HD going?

Brought my second PC home this week to try and get Win XP and RH9 installed on it whilst I'm "meant" to be doing Uni work!

Got WinXP on fine then thought I'd OC it a bit, (Spec is MSI KT3 Ultra, 512MB 3200 TwinMoss RAM, 1700+ DUT3C, Volcano 7+ modded, had the system at 180fsb when it was my main rig) but when I upped it from 133*11 to 133*11.5 I got the this error when booting up.

Cannot read boot sector, press ctl, alt + delete to restart, or something similar.

I never had this problem when my 120GB HD was in this system and this problem always comes up when I try and OC the system or turn it on after not using it for a few weeks.

So is the HD, a seagate barracuda 4 20GB going or dead or is something else wrong here?

Try the harddrive in your other machine, see if it throws the same error. If not, it's probably because of the overclock. Also, make sure that your FSB / PCI dividers are set right. At 133MHz FSB, it should be on a 1 : 4 ratio. Harddrives are known to get picky if the PCI bus is too far out of spec.

I think this has something to do with the PCI / AGP divider being overclocked which can affect the HD's have a look to see if there is any info in the bios about the dividers and if you can set the PCI bus to 33mhz and the AGP to 66mhz then overclock the CPU and FSB to whatever you are setting them at when overclocked and see if this takes that error away.

Also try relaxing your memory timings as that might be corrupting the Hardrive.

This is only a guess so i'd wait and see if anyone else has any suggestions.

(:o edit :- eldren got there first :) )

Reset the bios, if your lucky it will work, if not you have probably damaged the MBR. you can repair your installation if that is the case by booting from the xp cd, and setting up windows again.

;) Or typing FIXMBR from the Recovery Console (insert WinXP CD and choose repair when first propmpted). You can also wait for the second 'repair?' prompt which allows you to refresh your current install of Windows. Something like Scandisk or Chkdsk may also be able to help.

:cool: MSI KT3 Ultra is based on the VIA KT333 chipset, right? If so and IRC it is only designed for 266FSB, the 333 is derived from the ability to use asynced DDR333 (PC2700). It almost certainly only has a 1/4 divider which means anything over 266FSB (2x133) will steadily throw your PCI/AGP/IDE out of spec although you should be stable up to around 288FSB (2x144). Maybe the CPU simply couldn't handle the o/c or maybe you still had async RAM selected and your RAM couldn't handle it. You'll have to try the things mentioned so far to ascertain if the HD can be recovered.

Set everything back to default.
Grab "SeaTools Desktop" from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
Run the most advanced test and it'll find any problems hardware side if there is any :)

Chances are though, its the data on the drive thats taken a beating, and not the hardware itself.