Help...

[sumx4182]

MOD's, if you wouldnt mind letting this sit here for a bit before booting it to the PC section, it would be appreciated...

For some reason, a few weeks back, i had a blue screen of death error and when I restarted the computer, XP would not boot and I got a message telling me that the internal HD could not be detected. So I put in the XP install disk and ran the recovery prompt and did a checkboot and found that there was a problem with the boot sector so i then did a "FIXBOOT" for the boot sector and the computer then booted with no problem. Now, everytime I shut down the computer, I have to do the same thing. The computer runs fine once it's booted, nothing abnormal. But I would like to fix it permanently. Any idea what the problem is? Virus and spyware scans have been negative.

I'm running XP Home on a 2.6 Ghz Intel P4 Dell Inspiron 5150. 40gb hd, 512mb of RAM with a 160gb external Seagate HD.

[gtrhrcane]

Can you restore it before the date the blue death appeared? I'd try that.

[sumx4182]

i dont remember that date...but it's a consistant problem...everytime i restart, the boot sector goes bad again and it has to be fixed again...but i'm clean for any virus, trojans, spyware, and such

[gtrhrcane]

Do you have a ballpark idea? Within a couple weeks at least? It works great and if you don't have a lot that's been updated since that time I would really try and nail it before that date. The less you have to lose from updates the better but really... I'd weigh it.

Also, try all your scandisk and defrag utilities... but in my (limited) experience the restoral works best. Good luck man.

[sumx4182]

i'm worried it may be a hard disk problem itself, thats why i went out to buy the external...but I'm trying to avoid reformatting the whole drive and such because frankly, i dont have the time to do it all...

[Keith]

What file format are you running?. FAT32 or NTFS?. FAT32 is more vunerable to large amounts of corruption.
If you have not defragged your computer on a while, I would do that ASAP.
You could be looking at a format, but there are ways to clean this up.

[Eclectifish]

i'm worried it may be a hard disk problem itself, thats why i went out to buy the external...but I'm trying to avoid reformatting the whole drive and such because frankly, i dont have the time to do it all...
Do a backup now, as you may have a serious problem. All you really need to do is backup your data though. If you're running XP most of that will be in the My Computer Folder, but to get it all you should back up C:\Documents and Settings (that will get the desktop, most of your settings, even your browser's bookmarks).

Also, just look through your programs and see where they normally save things, just to be sure that you haven't saved data in another location. You can either move that to My Computer and back it up or back it up separately.

All of this should take no more than an hour. At this point, I'd make sure to save all new files to your portable if I were you.

Now, as to what's wrong. I think that it's very possible that the boot sector of your hard drive is damaged. The boot sector is sector 0 and cannot be moved, so what's happening is that you're actually booting from the CD as an emergency boot and running fixboot isn't actually fixing anything. You mentioned that, when you run fixboot, it boots OK, but did you do a restart or just let it continue to boot after starting up from the CD? If you didn't do a full restart then it's highly probable that the boot sector is damaged and the HD is in the throes of death. I really doubt that you could even reformat it.

If this is the case, the fix is really not to bad and can be done without a lot of attention from you. Just back the HD up completely (you can probably back it up to your external hard drive). This next part is important: You need to use a backup program that can be run from an external disk. There are ways to do this from your Windows CD, but you might be better off purchasing a program (I don't know what the best approach is right now, I'll research it and post back later on this). Backups can be automated, so you should be able to tell it to go, and come back in a few hours. The frustrating part is if it does fail and you have to try again, but it's worth a shot. Once the HD is backed up, you can try formatting and restoring, but I have a feeling (based on your problem) that format could fail. If that's the case, you'll have to buy a new HD, install it and format it. You can format from the Windows CD, by the way. After you have a properly formatted HD, you can restore your old hard drive from the backup and your on your way.

You might be able to fight through and find a fix, but I doubt it, and you'll probably spend less time just using this approach.

[sumx4182]

eclectifish, to answer your question, after the fixboot, the computer does shut down completely and boot back up into windows. After this initial boot, everytime the computer is shut down, the boot must be fixed again...