Hard drive woes

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 8:23 am

A friend who built and sold us our current computer recently did up a new hard drive to suit my needs: a dual boot 98SE/XP. This lets me do my work on 98SE, which is fast and stable, and run games on XP.

Got the sucker a few days back, and I've been loading in software. I can't simply migrate it, since the registry's a mess on the old drive, filled with all the wonderful programming detritus that seems a hallmark of Windows development all too often.

Problem is, this morning, after swapping out drives and swapping back, the Win98SE partition on the new drive won't load. I get a "Invalid System Disk" error from the DOS prompt (that's where he put the brief menu to select between Win98SE and XP) everytime I try loading it. I can still go into XP. If I bring up Win Explorer and try looking at the Win98SE partition, I can basically "see" the files, but I can't interact with them at all. They're "unavailable," or some such. Which makes sense, since the 98 OS on which they reside is dead.

In lieu of the guy returning my call tonight, any idea what I can try that might fix this?

Mr Flibble · Post by **Mr Flibble** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 1:10 pm

I hate to say it, but my first thought is that the partition table has gone kaboom. And that's not a good thing.

The first thing to try is obviously running a disk check through Win XP. Go into 'My Computer' r-click on the bad hard disk and select 'Properties'. Go to the 'Tools' tab and click on 'Error Checking'. Make sure the automatically fix option is checked and start the scan. It will probably want to reboot the machine to run the scan so it can get exclusive disk access.

Afterwards, whether it works or not, I would strongly recommend creating a copy of the disk using Norton Ghost or Powerquest Driveimage. Straight copying of the files may lead to even more problems.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 1:11 pm

It sounds like the machine cannot find IO.sys and MSDOS.sys to get the kernel for windows 98SE loaded. That's a tad rare for a system so new.

I'd start with a [chkdsk c:] in windows xp to check the integrity of the drive. Most hard drives, if they're going to experience a fatal physical flaw, happen during the "breaking-in" period of the HDD life.

From there, to be thorough, [chkdsk c: /f] will attempt to fix errors it may encounter on the named partition.

Because this drive is so new, I'd lean more to a physical problem rather a windows software/registry problem. Besides, windows is error free, remember.

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:56 pm

I tried both those ideas; they found nothing wrong. That leads me to suspect as you did, Fibble: it's the partition.

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:56 pm

I tried both those ideas; they found nothing wrong. That leads me to suspect as you did, Fibble: it's the partition.

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 8:41 pm

Wasn't the partition. Nearest we can figure, when I ran Norton Speed Disk, it moved the boot sector--which is no problem on NT, and death on 98. We had to copy the sysfiles back to the root.

Mr Flibble · Post by **Mr Flibble** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 9:52 pm

Yep, that'll do it.

Did you manage to get all the data back off the drive?

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 11:51 pm

The drive's in fine shape. I'm still a bit concerned, because I don't see any place in Norton SD for disabling a move of the boot sector. I can tell it to leave the autoexec.bat and config.sys alone, but that's about it. If that's the case, I don't know why it wouldn't do the same thing, again.

Meanwhile, rewriting the sys files in the root has disabled the double boot menu we have in place for XP--so we're going to figure out how to successfully "repair" XP and get those files back, without screwing anything else.

Mr Flibble · Post by **Mr Flibble** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 1:52 am

The boot sector should have been unmovable anyway. It's possible some of the files weren't marked with the 'system' attribute.

Probably the easiest method of dual-booting XP and Win98 is to use the XP boot.ini file. You can edit this from the 'System Properties' option box (r-click 'My Computer' and select properties, go to 'Advanced' and click the button marked 'Startup and Recovery') and add in an option of 'C:\' (or whatever drive letter Win98 is on) and you'll get the option of booting directly into 98. If your WinXP partition is NTFS then the 98 system won't even see it, so there's no chance of messing up Windows XP.

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 7:04 am

That's a point about the system attribute. Also, I set Speed Disk to run before hitting bed; when I returned, it looked like the machine had frozen, with a blank screen and no response to anything entered on the keyboard or through the trackball. I rebooted and used Norton Disk Doctor to see if anything was wrong, but nothing came up; so I ran Speed Disk again, in my presence. The fragmentation was much worse, which confirmed that the first SD run-through had been interrupted. I wonder if Norton moves some boot files before beginning the defragmentation process, and then moves them back afterwards?