This is really driving me nuts. After doing some research many sites have alleged this is a pretty common problem (although its never happened to my other PC or laptop and I frankly never even heard of it before recently), but this is getting ridiculous. I've had this happen to me 4 times on 3 different HDDs over about the space of year. There was absolutely nothing to be done for the 1st one. I couldn't even get it to boot from Disc so I replaced it. The 2nd wasn't quite as bad. I could acess the recovery console on my XP CD and I tried replacing the files, reconfiguring boot.ini, reinstalling windows so and so forth. Nothing worked and eventually a diagnostic test told me the drive was bad. It was under warranty so it was replaced no big deal. However, a short time later it happened AGAIN on the 3rd drive. Once again all repair attempts were futile. This time, however, I was able to reformat the drive and reinstall windows succesfully. It had been suggested to me that my Power Supply may have been insufficient or damaged so I had it replaced (also fortunately under warranty). But now its happened AGAIN! I've no doubt I'll be able to get my PC running again, and I've thankfully never lost any data to all of this, but I'd really LOVE to know how to prevent it in the future. ANY thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.
This can happen even if the ntldr file is NOT missing. It is usually caused by your partition table corruption and number of visible partitions seen by the windows os. There is a floppy boot image floating around on ythe net that will furnish the initial boot required files and a special boot.ini file that will help you boot your system regardless of the name of your windows directory or the partition where it is located. You could also try Bootit NG from terabyteunlimited to edit / fix your boot.ini file.
change the power supply out to a name brand. the corsair 450VX or antec earthwatts 380 will pretty much power up an everyday machine. if you have any power hungry graphic cards, the 550VX should be used. if the system was built from the ground up, the motherboard may be the problem.
Thanks for the tips...looks like I'll be needing it as my computer has gone down...again. I've considered the MoBo being the problem but after I install a fresh HDD (or reformat the existing HDD) it works again (for a while anyway), so it doesn't seem like the MoBo is messed up or it would still be nonfunctional even with a new HDD right? I'm looking into BootitNG...I'll let you know how it goes. Is there anything more specific I can use to search for that floppy boot image pmshah mentioned (or better yet anyone know a site where I can get it)?
Here's one other thing that's weird...maybe its nothing but I guess any little clue is helpful. It had occured to me before that each time I replaced or reformatted my HDD it lasted about the same amount of time and when I was looking at the recovery folder I made from the last time it went down I saw that I made it EXACTLY 2 months ago. Could there be something going on that causes this problem every 60 days? One other matter; every other time this has happened I've still had full access to all my data by putting the drive in an enclosure, but this time I can only get to most of my data. For some reason the folder in the path F:\Documents and Settings\Cylis is shown as being empty when I mouse over it and says it is inaccessible when I click on it. Naturally this is where all my Documents Pictures and Music folders are. Fortunately I have this backed up in other places, but its weird that only that one folder is messed up and I'm curious if that has something to do with whats happenening to my HDDs.
