Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[tcman41]

I am getting write delay and C:$mft errors on my machine, it now seems to be down for good. The weird thing is that my C: drive is the music drive and the G: drive is the window drive and i get the messeges stating C: drive problems yet the machine can't boot because it isn't finding the G: windows drive.

Any help, the windows drive and games drive run through a drive controller on the motherboard and the music drive is run through a third party controller.

[Mr ChriZ]

What happens when you boot?
Which drive is set to be booted from within the bios?

Theres many different configurations you can have here.
Just because G: is your windows drive does not necasserily
mean it's the drive the machine starts booting off.
To confuse things more each drive can have 0 or 1 active
partitions which the machine can use to boot. The active
partition can be used to start any number of Windows instalations
which maybe on any partition on any drive.
If you got Linux/Unix installed then it gets even more confusing.

If you just post any error messages tho when you start windows,
we can probably point ways to proceed.

[tcman41]

When i boot it doesn't, it's not physically finding the windows drive.

My boot order is hard disk, cd rom and then floppy.

running windows xp, i believe each drive is just one partition.

It's acting like the windows drive is just dead, doesn't appear to spinning up and before it all went completely dead i heard clicking noise.

TC

[bob]

You might have to put a dummy working drive in the C location because of the way windows figures out the physical drive order (like ChriZ said).

Check your bios settings for booting off which ever drive G is after adding the "new" C drive. Some bioses remap the drive boot order after modifying drives.

If your old C drive had multiple partitions, you'll have to make a new C drive with them as well I think.

Clicking is BAD! It wasn't a deathstar (deskstar) was it??

[Mr ChriZ]

In your initial post you mentioned there was write delay errors to C:
Although you say it's G: thats not even spinning up?

[glynor]

Sounds like your drive might have gone up to that big magnetic-media-playground in the sky.   

You might want to read what I wrote in this recent "Delayed Write Failure" posting over here.  Also, is your computer's BIOS detecting the drive?  If so, and you can hear it audibly "clicking" (more than the normal drive-access "groans" you hear during boot) you've likely got bad drive bearings (or something similar).  Either way, the drive probably pretty well toasted.  There is a possibility that it could just be your IDE cable though (while that often manifests as failure to detect the drive in the BIOS, that's not always the case)... Always worth trying swapping out the cable before declaring the drive dead!

As far as the C: D: G: drive lettering stuff.  If it was working before, and then stopped, and you weren't mucking about installing/removing drivers, playing in the registry, or deleting system files willy-nilly (installing or uninstalling serious software) then all of that is unlikely to be the cause.  It's not impossible, but software rarely "suddenly" causes the system to stop booting up anymore all on it's own (not counting Windows ME, that is).

At exactly what phase does it not boot?  Do you make it through POST?  Does the little white bar go across the bottom of the screen (the one that goes across just before the splash appears)?  Does the Windows XP splash screen appear?  Does it give you any kind of error or does it just freeze (or does it reboot endlessly in a cycle)?

EDIT: I just re-read one of your posts.  You say it isn't physically detecting the drive.  I'll assume you mean the BIOS doesn't see it.  In this case, replace the cable completely.  Try it again.  If you're lucky you just got a crimp in your cable.

Also, I'm not clear if the drive that died is the one on the add-in IDE card but if so... I'm assuming you have this installed on an add-in card because your computer can't see the full size of the drive with your onboard IDE port.  If so, try it on the onboard IDE anyway, just to see if the BIOS will see it (it won't boot because it won't see the full partition, but if it detects it you might be looking at a bad add-in IDE card).

Last, but not least, see if you can take the drive to a local computer shop and have them test it.  If they can get it to spin up, it could be a more serious problem on your motherboard.  This is fairly unlikely, but it would stink to buy a new drive only to discover your old one was fine and the rest of the computer was shot!  (Lightning can do terrible things after all, and the storm can sometimes be a LONG way away).

[tcman41]

Took the drive out, tested it and it's just plain dead. Reinstalled windows on one of the other two drives and in the process straighten out all the drive letters to be in correct order.

I have reinstalled all programs, including media center  and all is good in the world again.

TC