[Singh]

Well, I may just end up being out of commision for a while.

We were trying to set up my bro's new external 120Gig hard disk with win2k/98, but the attempt failed horribly when it pretty much blew my mobo - now it just starts for a few seconds, and then dies out for no particular reason

Although it sounds bad, its not that bad as the second bit of news. After taking out my backup Motherboard (yes, I do have a backup) and re-connecting my HDs, im greeted with the sight of one HD supposedly missing ntldr and not being able to boot up from it, and the other one containing Win2k refuses to load the OS, and while going into safe mode, it crashes, with the letters turning out to be pretty garbled up.

I fear both my HDs have gone, the one win2k on it is the 6gb one, so its not much of a loss, but my other hardisk (40gigs) with all my data and a backup win2k os is the one that refuses to boot up, giving me fears that all my data may just be corrupted and unrecoverable.

If that happens....well, its pretty damn sad, to say the least - all my data, including every mission, background, DoGA model, every screenshot, picture and whatever I have done over the past year and a half would be gone (worse...all my stories as well )- all thanks to my stupid brother's impatience in getting his stupid HD running and refusing to wait till we had either more money or more time to properly prepare! I dont even have a working CD-Rom (going to borrow my uncle's one now [im typing from his PC now])  with which to re-install win2k and survey teh damage.

In other words, if I promised any project anything right now, I'm afraid that I wont be able to deliver for around a week or two more, and I apologize. At the very least, re-installing and setting up all my directories again is going to take a long time, and I wont be able to do much over the next week.

Again, sorry.

[Zarax]

The NTLDR problem should be fixeable without too many problems, just do an unattendend XP install over the old one... You need it because XP won't start on a different motherboard than the one it's installed on.

Let me know if you need further help.

[Turnsky]

OUCH

sorry to hear that, dude..

but, try connecting a HD with just an OS on it, and connect the other two as secondry drives, and see if the data is intact that way..

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Zarax
The NTLDR problem should be fixeable without too many problems, just do an unattendend XP install over the old one... You need it because XP won't start on a different motherboard than the one it's installed on.

I've never heard about XP doing that. Even if it's true I don't think it's the cause of this particular error. More likely is that NTLDR itself is corrupt or that boot.ini is simply pointing to the wrong place.
(Also Singh said he's using 2K not XP anyway).

@Singh  : You said that the drive with all your data on it was the backup OS which leads me to believe that it was either the primary slave or on the secondary channel. In both cases the drive probably wouldn't have had a copy of NTLDR on it. All you need to do then is to run the recovery console and copy NTLDR to your HD. (You'll probably need a new boot.ini file too)

Turnsky has a good idea though and if you need more help try and catch me on Yahoo and I'll give you as much help as I can.

[Zarax]

BTW, are you sure you didn't swap the disk placing?

NTLDR looks for the exact disk placement and partition (IE, disk 1, partition 0) for booting purposes, if all else fails look at MSDN and you'll find the instruction to make a boot floppy with NTLDR and all the other stuff

[Singh]

(posting from bro's hijacked laptop)

a floppy wont be much use, sadly, because I lack a drive

Now I cant even re-install windows on it, due to the fact that everytime it gets to the "setup is starting windows" once I boot through the windows xp CD.

I'll try and see if i can't use that suggestion though. Might have gotten my disks crossed when I put them back in, from the looks of it >_<

[Singh]

w00t! The good news: all the data on my 40gig is safe! I just connected it to the external HDD casing and then to the laptop and went through my files - its all there, including the most important folder: the fs2 folder

The bad - I am still unable to install windows 2000 on the other hard disk connected to my mobo...I'm considering moving that one into the external casing, and then using the laptop to install directly into it. Would that work at all?

[Zarax]

Yeah, that should work as long as the partition # will be the same

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Singh, check this out: Link


No need to completely install 2K again.
Best of luck getting fully operational.
[/color]

[Zarax]

Yeah, that's the right one, good pick Maeg

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Zarax
Yeah, that's the right one, good pick Maeg

[color=66ff00]I've been in Singh's position a few times unfortunately when I remove a dual booting setup so I've got quite familiar with how to fix this.
[/color]

[Zarax]

Yeah, it can be nasty...
After having fixed zillions PCs for years I've seen much worse...

[Singh]

Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]Singh, check this out: Link


No need to completely install 2K again.
Best of luck getting fully operational.
[/color]

too late, actually, as I've already completely formatted the disk and trying to install xp...

My main mobo has been totally fried, after taking it down to the shop, along with the CPU, which just sucks. Fortunately, my other mobo seems ok, just taht one of the ram may be spoilt, and hence it hangs when trying to isntall or run windows. Worse is that my win2k CD appears to be dead, leaving me to install Xp on a 1gig athlon, with only 256 Mb ram

But it's still better than nothing - going back later on to try and get it all patched up. If everything works as planned (ha!), I should be back up and playing navyfield by tonight, provided my bro doesn't try to cock it up again by trying to fix his 120gig again