A friends HDD may have a problem with MBR. However, after a computer freeze his PC would not boot up. After that, although BIOS is set to AUTO, His PC is not even recognizing the HDD now. (And curiously the BIOS seems so slow in acting). Anyway, on my PC, his HDD is recognised by WINDOWS when I'm not using it as the active /bootable drive. When trying to boot from it (not letting it go far for obvious reasons) it seems my BIOS on my PC probably does not recognise the HDD, because it will not even begin to boot. I cannot access the HDD using Partition Magic from the CD.
So, it looks like whenever one tries to boot from the HDD, it is not recognised. Otherwise WINDOWS will recognise it.
I wonder if MBR was partly bad, would that stop BIOS recognising a HDD at bootup? Of course, I muse about WINDOWS recognising the HDD and wonder why the difference. Any explanations? Thanks. Rich
When a HDD is not recognised by BIOS
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Richard 001
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Not strictly a BIOS issue, but I have a hunch (hope) that actually doing an MBR fix may clear the problem. Because my friend is running WINDOWS Millenium, he cannot use a RECOVERY CONSOLE, but I can use FDISK/MBR.
If I went and tried FDISK/MBR I would be okay wouldn't I? There is only 1 partition on the HDD.
SAMSUNG HDD untility reported:
READ DMA: Sector Error
CHECK M.C. Ecc Error
CHeCK SMART: Abort Command
SIMPLE SURFACE SCAN: Ecc error.
CURRENT SIZE: 32253MB
NATIVE SIZE:....38204MB
I've also seen on a disk scan: "The second boot sector is unwriteable", and noted 4KB bad sector on the HDD. I wonder if the HDD developed a 4KB bad sector in the boot sectpor of the HDD.
Any tools I could be using? Thanks. Rich.
If I went and tried FDISK/MBR I would be okay wouldn't I? There is only 1 partition on the HDD.
SAMSUNG HDD untility reported:
READ DMA: Sector Error
CHECK M.C. Ecc Error
CHeCK SMART: Abort Command
SIMPLE SURFACE SCAN: Ecc error.
CURRENT SIZE: 32253MB
NATIVE SIZE:....38204MB
I've also seen on a disk scan: "The second boot sector is unwriteable", and noted 4KB bad sector on the HDD. I wonder if the HDD developed a 4KB bad sector in the boot sectpor of the HDD.
Any tools I could be using? Thanks. Rich.
If you email me include [WIMSBIOS] in the subject.
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Richard 001
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- Joined: Wed Aug 20, 2003 10:34 am
Well, after having it in my PC, I simply put the HDD back in my friends PC. Not actually having done anything, except removed some viruses that were on the HDD (I don't think they were causing the problem) it now boots.
Just one BIOS message: "SMART command failure". Then have to press F1. Could be on it's way out, or not I guess.
Just one BIOS message: "SMART command failure". Then have to press F1. Could be on it's way out, or not I guess.
