Hello,
Hardware is Dell Inspiron 9300, Windows XP MCE + SP2. I installed a 250GB WD hard drive in January 2008, and removed the existing 80GB drive. The new drive is IDE, as this seems to have been the last Inspiron made without SATA. The following story has happened three times since January.
I booted the WD Data Lifeguard Tools CD 11.2 and created a partition of size 250GB. I booted Dell's XP CD and installed XP without incident. The computer runs fine for a while. After some time, the computer boots to an empty text screen with a cursor in the upper-left corner. This is right after POST and before anything Windows-related happens. So, F8 doesn't work, safe mode doesn't work, and there's no Windows logo. The only thing that I could think of that worked was to delete the partition and recreate it.
The first two times that this happened, it was after about 2 months of using the computer. Everything worked very well in that time. I can't think of anything that happened out of the ordinary on the days when the computer stopped booting.
The third time, I did a few things slightly differently. I installed CentOS (and a swap partition) on two other partitions. I installed GRUB as well, thinking that this might help diagnose the problem. It turns out that XP stopped booting after less than a month. GRUB works fine, and I can boot into CentOS without problem. When I try to boot into XP, it shows the "rootnoverify" and "chainloader" lines on the screen, and then nothing more.
Here's a list of things that I've tried, in no particular order:
I ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT from the XP recovery console. This removed GRUB, but it didn't boot into Windows. I reinstalled GRUB after this.
I ran chkdsk from XP recovery console.
I checked the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files. They match the files on the XP install CD.
Interestingly, I can read the files from the XP partition in CentOS. I've been able to back up my files *after* the boot problems each time.
Anyone have any ideas? I appreciate the help.
- Kert
Hardware is Dell Inspiron 9300, Windows XP MCE + SP2. I installed a 250GB WD hard drive in January 2008, and removed the existing 80GB drive. The new drive is IDE, as this seems to have been the last Inspiron made without SATA. The following story has happened three times since January.
I booted the WD Data Lifeguard Tools CD 11.2 and created a partition of size 250GB. I booted Dell's XP CD and installed XP without incident. The computer runs fine for a while. After some time, the computer boots to an empty text screen with a cursor in the upper-left corner. This is right after POST and before anything Windows-related happens. So, F8 doesn't work, safe mode doesn't work, and there's no Windows logo. The only thing that I could think of that worked was to delete the partition and recreate it.
The first two times that this happened, it was after about 2 months of using the computer. Everything worked very well in that time. I can't think of anything that happened out of the ordinary on the days when the computer stopped booting.
The third time, I did a few things slightly differently. I installed CentOS (and a swap partition) on two other partitions. I installed GRUB as well, thinking that this might help diagnose the problem. It turns out that XP stopped booting after less than a month. GRUB works fine, and I can boot into CentOS without problem. When I try to boot into XP, it shows the "rootnoverify" and "chainloader" lines on the screen, and then nothing more.
Here's a list of things that I've tried, in no particular order:
I ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT from the XP recovery console. This removed GRUB, but it didn't boot into Windows. I reinstalled GRUB after this.
I ran chkdsk from XP recovery console.
I checked the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files. They match the files on the XP install CD.
Interestingly, I can read the files from the XP partition in CentOS. I've been able to back up my files *after* the boot problems each time.
Anyone have any ideas? I appreciate the help.
- Kert