Help my PC has gone kaput

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sahib

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 19, 2006
Messages
3,845
Location
Glasgow - UK
I was opening a folder and it went into loop. I re-started it. It loads the welcome to Microsoft Pentium 4 da da da orange colour screen, then it goes black and right at the top of the screen only one line appears.

NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to re-start.

I do.

It goes back to the beginning and does the same thing. Over and over. I turned it off. Waited for a while. Turned it on and does the same thing. I can't go passsed to first line.

I am desperate as that is my main pc with all of my e-mails. I have got a back-up of my accounts etc but my e-mails are there.

I had my old NT machine (yes NT ha ha). I have just wired it up and that is where I am connecting from.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mega thanks in advance.

Mega thanks in advance.
 
Uh, Windows quirks are hard to repair, format C + re install windows is the best option.

You can use some bootable operating system such as http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html to start the machine from CD and do backups to memory stick or to another drive. Other option is to put the hard disk to your NT machine and do backups with that machine.

Good luck!:)
 
My memory is vague, but I had this happen. I booted from a special CD and repaired the windows installation.

I think from here:

http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

I then backed up the drive and got a new hard disk to be safe.

You can also try to do it through the Recovery Console on the Windows install CD:

   * Insert the Windows CD and start the computer.
   * When the Welcome to Setup screen appears, press R.
   * Type a number corresponding to the Windows installation you wish to repair (usually 1) and press Enter.
   * When prompted, type the administrator password and press Enter.
   * From the command prompt, copy NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the i386 folder of the CD to the root folder of the hard drive. In the example commands given below, C: is the hard drive and D: is the CD-ROM drive. You will need to change the drive letters if appropriate:
     COPY D:\I386\NTLDR C:\
     COPY D:\I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\
   * Remove the Windows XP CD from the drive and restart the computer.


But before you do any of that, try removing all other media like CD's and USB keys from the system. Maybe the machine is trying to boot from some other non-bootable drive.
 
Thank you guys. I think the easiest way is to remove the hardisks and install them into another machine and back-up the e-mails.
 
Ntldr missing usually means that it's the hardisk that is kaput.
Of course, try hooking it up to the other computer to see if it works.
There's also a possibility that the disk haven't croaked, but settings in your bios are wrong and it's looking for the ntldr in the wrong place.
Usually happens when you change your config, like, have a usb drive hooked up.
So check the boot settings in bios.
 
sahib said:
Thank you guys. I think the easiest way is to remove the hardisks and install them into another machine and back-up the e-mails.

Yes - try this first and salvage what you can.

Then try and restore.
 
I fear a hard disk failure. When I try to boot it I hear a squeeky, screamy noise from one of the hard disks.

I had two seperate disks in my machine. My brother partitioned it at the time  (the machine is ten years old) using Partition magic. I should still have it somewhere. I am not in speaking terms with him so I have to work this out myself. I think he kept one disk as C for the system and partitioned the other as D, E , F and G. I have my documents in E and G is the picture archive. So hopefully they all should be o.k. But what I would like to know is that where the e-mails are stored. They wouldn't be in the system drive would they? If I can't get them back it will be a total disaster as I have all my robotics customers there. Thirteen years of work. I really feel stupid not to back them up. I backed up all the files except the e-mails.

Mega thanks.
 
another uh :) Depends on your settings if your emails are only in your computer or in the server also. There is two protocols for receiving mail, POP and IMAP. POP protocol deletes mail from server after it has saved a local copy. If you are using Microsoft Outlook, email folders are saved to your system drive if you run it with default settings. I think email folder is saved as .pst file. Hopefully you'll get your email back!
 
Server is POP3 so they are all deleted after the download. And it looks like all the e-mails are in the system drive. Tomorrow will tell what the score is.
 
if the hard drive is not read by the pc your using to grab your files  (hard drive failure,and yes symptoms seem to imply  this is the case) dont give up hope. put your hard drive in a air tight sealable plastic baggie with some moisture absorbent dessicant packs. place this in your freezer over night. then try again.
as i understand it, the disk part of a hard drive floats as it spins (achieved magnetically)  as you can imagine tolerences are very tight. the scraping you hear is your HD disc
hitting against some other parts of the hard drive. freezing the hard drive slightly shrinks the parts and can allow you to use the hard drive for 10 or 15 minutes ubtil it warms up and expands. while it does not work all the time i know for a fact this has worked. it is not :urban ledgend good luck
hope you dont need to try this 
 
Seavote, i know the type of failure you describing, I think it was fujitsu brand, if I'm not mistaken, they had this controller chip that overheated badly and (again if i'm not mistaken) was losing contact in the middle somewhere and that's how freezing would help, temporarily.
 
The high-rpm spindle speeds of a hard disk make the platters rotate so fast that a cushion of air develops around them. This cushion of air is what keeps the heads from hitting the platter(s). This is why the disk must spin up first, before the heads are released to travel over the platters.

The freezing thing does work in some cases. However, with the symptoms further described here, I would try to find an additional, IDENTICAL drive. (pricewatch.com has a lot of vendors with hard to find older models) Carefully transplant the controller card PCB from the "new" drive to the "bad" one.

The last thing you need is a head crash where the head strikes the rotating platter!
 
Well, it all makes sense now. I actually had the warning for sometime. The pc was freezing every so often. I used to re-start it and it would go for a while and freeze again. It woudl do this about twice a day. But sometimes it would go for days without freezing. I now know why. I have some hard disks that were bought round about the same time. Hopefully there is a matching one that I can replace the controller board with. I'll do it after give them a try to read them on another machine. A friend of mine was actually throwing his old machine that run on 98 and I kept it. As they say "try it on somebody else's horse"  :D
 
Try replacing the PCB first.
I even had luck with different PCBs, replaced a S-ATA PCB with an IDE PCB :eek:
(both HDs were the same brand and model but with different interfaces)
worked.

If the motor isn't spinning up correctly put it outside, I don't think you need a freezer at the moment :D
Make sure once it is frozen you already have another HD with enough space connected to the computer ...

best of luck!
 
Just to update the post.

I bought an IDE to USB adapter and read both hard disks without any problem. I copied the files onto my external USB drive to back up and even deleted and re-wrote over them to test. Which indicates that the hard disks are fine and the problem was/ is obviously the bios corruption. I have no idea how it happened.

Thanks to you all for the advices.
 
A useful hint for next time (for all). Last year my big hard drive, the one with all the audio data on it, went packing; my computer (Win XP) wouldn't read it. I asked one of my students, very computer savvy, if he had any suggestions; he offered to try it on his Linux machine. Well, that machine read it just fine, and he copied the data onto a new drive for me. I paid him a hundred bucks and felt I got more than my money's worth. Oh, he then tried it on his machine in Windows mode (it's a dual-boot) and it wouldn't read at all.

Evidently Linux machines are a lot less picky about reading drives. Point well taken.

Peace,
Paul
 
Sounds like a problem with the boot sector's of the drive...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_sector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_boot_record


http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm
 
ya,
i have the same thing on two previous drives i understand are boot sector failures.
i'm still using one 500gb, its worked just fine for storage,for a long time now.
i wouldn't run an OS from it again tho.
 
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