Alright, here's the deal:
Some background information... My new system had been running fairly well, except for an occasional blue screen and reboot while gaming, which I had attributed to my video card, but hadn't really looked into. One time when this happened, however, when I rebooted, my second CD-ROM drive had disappeared. Another time, Windows refused to restart, giving me an "unmountable boot area" error.
So anyway, a few days ago, I walked in the room in time to see an error box pop up on the screen, shortly followed by a BSOD and reboot. But the thing is, it won't reboot properly. I have the last boot device as IDE-0, my hard drive, and when it gets to that device, it indicates that it's found a boot record, but then refuses to continue booting up. It just sits there, displaying "Searching for Boot Record at IDE-0..OK"
So, I tried to reinstall Windows, or at least boot from the XP disk to see what I could do, but the screen simply went black after "Setup is examining your system configuration..."
So, I've tried switching my ATA devices around in the IDE channels, changing the boot order; I tried fdisk /mbr for the master boot record, and I've tried booting with different RAM just in case, but nothing has worked. I've tried numerous troubleshooting techniques, as well as a hard drive test or two. The SMART HD reports that it's running normally, fdisk has no trouble recognizing it, scandisk finds no errors, it shows up in the BIOS and CMOS fine, the drive spins up normally when I power on, and there have been no BIOS updates for my mobo pertaining to hard drives.
So... Basically, I'm really stumped. It's a Seagate Barracuda IV 20 GB drive, ST320011A, and an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I have no idea what the problem is.
Some background information... My new system had been running fairly well, except for an occasional blue screen and reboot while gaming, which I had attributed to my video card, but hadn't really looked into. One time when this happened, however, when I rebooted, my second CD-ROM drive had disappeared. Another time, Windows refused to restart, giving me an "unmountable boot area" error.
So anyway, a few days ago, I walked in the room in time to see an error box pop up on the screen, shortly followed by a BSOD and reboot. But the thing is, it won't reboot properly. I have the last boot device as IDE-0, my hard drive, and when it gets to that device, it indicates that it's found a boot record, but then refuses to continue booting up. It just sits there, displaying "Searching for Boot Record at IDE-0..OK"
So, I tried to reinstall Windows, or at least boot from the XP disk to see what I could do, but the screen simply went black after "Setup is examining your system configuration..."
So, I've tried switching my ATA devices around in the IDE channels, changing the boot order; I tried fdisk /mbr for the master boot record, and I've tried booting with different RAM just in case, but nothing has worked. I've tried numerous troubleshooting techniques, as well as a hard drive test or two. The SMART HD reports that it's running normally, fdisk has no trouble recognizing it, scandisk finds no errors, it shows up in the BIOS and CMOS fine, the drive spins up normally when I power on, and there have been no BIOS updates for my mobo pertaining to hard drives.
So... Basically, I'm really stumped. It's a Seagate Barracuda IV 20 GB drive, ST320011A, and an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I have no idea what the problem is.
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