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Power failure during boot up

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:11 am
by lrawlins
Hi,

One of our clerks was just logging into their computer when a power failure occurred.

When the power came back on and he turned the machine on again he got a message that the boot blocks had been damaged and the machine did not complete the boot sequence.

Is this something that is repairable or should I just pick a new drive for it?

The real bummer is this machine had been in service for less than a month.

Bye,

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:26 am
by rpyne
It is repairable. back in the DOS days, you could just boot off a floppy and with one command restore the boot track.

Under XP, you can use the recovery console, from booting off the recovery CD, to rewrite the boot sector. the instructions can be found here: http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_ ... %20Sector:

I have never had to use Windows 7, so I don't know for sure, but I found this article that describes the process: http://www.ehow.com/how_4836283_repair-mbr-windows.html

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:46 pm
by lrawlins
If it only was that easy!

Recovery mode will not run, safe mode will not run, booting from DVD gives some strange error about "paged_fault in non paged area"

Next will try and boot from a different drive and if that works will see if I can retrieve data from this drive then reinstall the operating system.

Makes me wonder exactly what happened to it.

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:53 pm
by russellhltn
Once you get it to a point that you can do something, try running a "chkdsk /f" on the drive. I recovered a laptop that was looking like I'd have to completely reformat that way.

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:08 pm
by KenRichins
you might try mounting the drive on a different computer and then run chkdsk /f to see if the drive is fixable. there are other drive repair utilities that can be tried also. Seagate has a free Hard Drive repair utility as does Western Digital