Boot drive stopped booting...

[Craptastic]

I've run up an oddball problem that is stretching my sanity awfully thin.  

I recently bought a 300gb Seagate HD.  I decided to make this into a boot drive.  My comp is a Dell Dimension 8200.  I'm not sure exactly what sort of MB it's packing, but someone over on the Dell forums said that with the latest bios it shouldn't matter what size the drive is.  Sure enough, after installing the drive and going into the bios, it detected a 300gb Hard Drive with no apparent problems.

That said...I booted to my Windows XP Professional SP2 disc, and let it format the disc and install windows.  Every time it went to boot to the newly installed Windows XP, it would load the bios and then just stop.  (yes, the boot order was Floppy--->Hard Disk--->CD Rom, so that's not the issue).  My comp HAD been trying to load the Intel Boot Agent about the time it would stop, so I uninstalled that using the Boot Agent command prompt software that I downloaded from Intel.  

After disabling that stupid thing, I rebooted, checked the bios, sure enough, it detected the drive just fine, 300gb, no problems.  And this time when it went to boot up it said "DISK READ ERROR, CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart"

That got me thinking about whether the XP Pro SP2 disc was having trouble formatting the drive.  So I booted to a Symantec Parition Magic disk instead.  When it examined the partition, it found all sorts of errors, which I instructed it to fix by reformatting the drive completely.  

I booted to the XP Pro SP2 disc again, and then told it to install windows on the existing partition.  It rebooted and Windows loaded fine.  I've been using the 300gb disk without problems for a couple weeks.  There was one program that I hadn't found the install disks for that I have to use occasionally for work.  So I have just been turning the computer off, and swapping the 300gb drive with the 80gb drive with my original OS install on it.  (XP Home Edition in this case).  This also has been working fine for the last couple weeks.  

However...tonight I swapped in the 80gb drive and got some beeps and an "unable to detect hard drive 0" error mesg.  I checked the bios...it wasn't there.  I checked the cables, the jumpers, nothing seemed to work.  Finally I swapped the 300gb back in...went into the bios to make sure everything was okay, and they still detected the 300gb drive.  I exited without changing anything, and after the bios loaded, the computer just SAT THERE.  In the upper left hand corner there was a blinking cursor (the kind that's usually there for a couple seconds before the Windows screen pops up).  It just sits there and sits there, no hard drive activity, nothing.  Nothing happens after as long as 20 minutes.  

I shut the comp down and threw the 80gb back in.  It booted up this time.  I put the 300gb into my USB drive enclosure, and it popped up, all the data intact, the windows directory instact.  I double checked to make sure the boot.ini was there, and the ntldr and all those fun files...they're all there.  I shut down...again, and put the 300gb back in.  Same thing.  It sits there with the cursor blinking in the top left hand corner.  

I booted to some various utilities that I have laying around.  One of them is Winternals ERD Commander.  It shows the XP install, there are no corrupted system files, no disk errors.  I even did a system restore to a couple days ago, but that didn't help either.  

So I'm on the 80gb drive at the moment.  The 300gb is in the USB enclosure.  I ran a disk check and defragged, and that didn't pop up anything odd.  

So the long and short is...I've been swapping these back and forth for a couple weeks with no problems.  Magically the 300gb has stopped booting up.  I should also note, that I tried putting a fresh install of Windows on top of it (which gets installed in windows.0 and the boot.ini identified it as the default OS) but it still wouldn't boot!  I would understand if perhaps it had never worked, but the fact I've been using it for a couple weeks (the 300gb drive as my boot drive) and now it magically stopped working is driving me to the brink here.  

Other things to note:  I have not installed any other hardware, and the restore I did with ERD Commander undid the single software addition I'd made.  The 300gb drive is set to Master when it's hooked up, and it's the only drive on the IDE cable.  Same with the 80gb drive.  

So if anyone out there, more in tune with this sorta stuff that me, can help...it will definitely be greatly appreciated.  

CT

[IT-Guy]

OK... a couple things I didn't see in your story... But you probably left out because it was obvious, but I thought I'd ask if when you're swapping disks, are you going into the bios and refreshing it with the latest update?  Also, I was thinking... when you first installed windows on your 300 Gig, you said you installed it from within windows of the other disk... That could possibly cause a problem there.. depending on whether you had made XP the root drive.  Best thing to do is leave both disks attached, refresh and save the bios so it knows which disk is where... then just modify your boot.ini to give you a choice when you boot the system... then you wouldn't have to swap anything.  On the other hand, you said you had it in an enclosure... Was this because you wanted to keep it mobile?  Enclosures are sooo much slower than IDE, it really isn't worth it.

[Craptastic]

Yup, let me clear a couple things up.  I did a fresh install of XP Pro SP2 on the 300gb disk.  It's worked fine for a couple weeks as the boot drive.  It was clean install...newly formatted disk...it was only AFTER this latest problem that I tried to reinstall the OS on top of the other windows, just to see whether there was a problem with XP, but that didn't work either.  The boot.ini was defaulted to the new install and it still didn't work.  

Now...the Drive enclosure is just what I used to check the 300gb disk when I couldn't get it to boot.  I normally have ALL DRIVES installed inside the computer.  I ONLY used it to make sure the data on the 300gb drive was intact, and it was.  

And you misunderstood about installing windows on the 300gb.  I installed that after booting to the XP Pro SP2 CD-ROM, and installed it directly onto the freshly formatted disk.

Yes, when I mention going into the bios and checking that it recognized the drive...is that what you mean by refreshing?  It detects the drive and I save & exit the bios.  

[Backdated]

If you partition the drive to say a 10-15Gig boot drive and a few <130Gig slaves, does the problem persist?
The 10-15Gig figure may seem small but there are methods of keeping only the OS and programs on your boot drive. In conjunction with a drive/partition imaging program, this is the recommended way to go.

[Craptastic]

Well, it seems to me that if being over the 137 gig size was a problem, I wouldn't have been able to use the 300gb as a boot drive for the last couple weeks with no problems (even with swapping) until the problems now.  It should NEVER have worked if that was the issue, right?

[Backdated]

Right? Not necessarily but I'm not sure. I'm supposing that it would only bork if and when data was written outside of XPs "boundaries" as it were.
Personally, I don't think that current software technology is ready for such large drives. Drive size seems to be directly related to problems experienced after the 130Gig clip. Of course, it may simply be that tolerances are so much tighter as capacity increases.

[Craptastic]

I'll try to delete some data and get it below 137gb and see if it boots.  

Addition:  I just noticed when I tried to delete some folders...that it gave me "folder is corrupt" popup.  I'm going to dig through my discs and see if I have a decent disk utility.  If anyone has any suggestions...the XP chkdsk hasn't noticed anything...

[Backdated]

It's exactly this sort of thing that makes me wonder about the softwares ability to handle the hardware correctly.

I'll have a look at what HD tools I may have available but the hard drive vendor should have tools available via their support site.

[Craptastic]

Well...some more strangeness:

I tried AGAIN to use the XP "check disk for errors" thingy.  The first time I ran it, it said "Windows cannot check this drive for errors" which I thought was a little strange.  Then I tried it again a few minutes later, and it made it through Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3, with no problems.  It made it about 60% through Phase 4 and just hung up.  Stopped and sat there for almost 2 hours.  

Eventually I restarted the comp.  I booted to Seatools boot disc that I downloaded off of Seagate's website.  It ran its tests, and the one it failed was the file structure test.  Here is what it told me:

"One or more file names contained errors"
"One or more errors were found in the index"
"One or more errors were found in metadata file records"
"Other errors were found"

Norton Partition Magic says the following:

"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 20"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 21"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 22"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 23"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 3815"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 3872"
"Error 1607 File Record Marked Free, File 3877"
"Error 1507 Bad File Record Signature"
"Error 1507 Bad File Record Signature"
Info Check Complete.  

So basically it reports these errors, but can't fix them.  Any ideas what fixes these errors?  File Structure seems to be the problem here.  

Thanks for all the help so far...

[Backdated]

Running chkdsk /f should fix these errors (On reboot) but I've seen this mentioned quite a few times now and I'm becoming convinced it's down to disk/partition size. You have to ask why these errors occur in the first place.
The disks themselves seem to be OK so that basically leaves the controllers or the software. Perhaps updated chipset drivers may help in this regard but I'm assured in at least a couple of cases that it makes no difference.

[Craptastic]

Here's the result of that chkdsk:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

 293025568 KB total disk space.
 127502788 KB in 52397 files.
     17752 KB in 5283 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    137140 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 165367888 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  73256392 total allocation units on disk.
  41341972 allocation units available on disk.

[Craptastic]

I also tried a chkdsk /r and it hung up at 53%


EDIT:   It wasn't hung up, it was just going really slowly.  I let it run for 4 hours, and it went from 53% to 67%  Now it's moving a little more frequently.

I think I've pretty much decided to just wipe my 80gb drive and do a clean install on that...don't want this hassle