Help Please

NEED HELP WITH THIS PROBLEM :

Hi, my father has a DELL Optiplex Gx240 running Windows XP Pro. Recently he had a power failure and lost his System Disk. Fortunately his data was into another partition on that drive and there also was a Ghost image of his installation. Since I could not recover his C: (system) drive, I got a new Western Digital EIDE 250 Gb. Using partition magic on my computer, I partitioned the new drive in two different partitions. One, the Primary DOS NTS formatted of 30 Gb which I reserved for the system and and a second NTFS for his data with approx 215 Gb. From Windows Explorer on my computer I could see the new drive (connected through USB) and both partitions. I could copy the Ghost image (Symantec ver 8) to the second partition and move files around on both partitions. The hard drive was tested with WD diagnostic soft and went through Ok.

I then re-installe de new drive into my dad's computer and booted from a DOS 6.22 diskette. I noticed a message saying that "Primary hard disk drive 0 not found" and "Primary hard disk drive 1 not found" so I went into the BIOS to make sure the drive was active. It was and was properly identified by the BIOS.

I then completed the Boot process and ran the Ghost program from a diskette. Ghost could see the hard disk and I could de-ghost the image I had copied on the second partition to the first partition.

When I rebooted, The computer without a diskette, I stil had the "Primary hard disk drive 0 not found" message.

I can stille see the drive in my dad's computer BIOS, and I can see the de-ghosted files in Windows Explorer on my computer.

So everything is there but the Optiplex does not seem to be aware of it. Since the waranty is over, is there any suggestion from someone of the next step I can take to solve this issue.

By the way, I updated my dad's computer from Phoenix BIOS A01 to A05.

Completely at a loss...

 

Hi SantAndre,

I assume that since you can see the drive in the BIOS that the drive is installed on IDE chain 1 and it is set as the primary (master) drive?

On the partition formating... What is a DOS NTS partition? You options should have been FAT32 and NTFS. Please clarify.

In the BIOS, what size is reported for the new drive?

 

Hi itguy,

Yes the drive is installed on the IDE chain 1 as master.

I am sorry about the the confusion in the partition description. There are two partitions, both are NTFS with the first one at 28 Gb and the second at ~220 Gb. But I also tried with three 1- NTFS, 28 Gb, 2- FAT32, 28 GB, 3- NTFS, 180 Gb.

In the BIOS, the size reported is 250 Gb which is the right size.

 

Hi itguy,

Just to give you more info, I set the jumper in the three possible positions : Master, Cable Select and no jumper.

I believe the problem is at the computer level and not on the config side (BIOS). I read somewhere(??) that this could indicate either a mother board or a power supply problem. Un fortunately I do not have the DELL diagnostic disk as the computer was purchased second hand last year.

 

Just out of curosity....

Why not run GHOST from floppy or CD and install your image?

If you really want to partition the drive later, don't really understand why, you could get Partition Majic for his machine.

 

I had to partition the 250 Gb because I wanted to put the image stored on original HD onto the second partition of the new WD disk. I could not read the original disk on my dad's computer. I had in fact to recover some of this drive's data using R-Studio from my computer and just reading the damaged drive took extremely long. When I saw the image (and other important data) on the bad disk I hastily copied all of it to my own system.

So, then I partitioned the new 250 Gb drive in two, copied the image on the second partition, installed the new drive in my dad's computer, booted from a diskette and de-ghosted from partition two to partition one. Normally after this process, all that is left to do is reboot from the HD and you are in business again. But... this is when I noticed that the problem was not only the drive but also the computer. This is why I thought I should update the BIOS to Phoenix A05 etc etc etc

Remember, Ghost could see the hard drive on my dad's computer, the BIOS could see it also but during boot process I always got the infamous message "Primary hard disk drive 0 not found" and "Primary hard disk drive 1 not found"...

 

Dell systems ship with a small primary partition on the first hard drive that houses the utilities. It's only about 15 megs but it slides your partition numbers by 1. I think your boot.ini file is looking to boot from partition 1 and your ghosted image that used to sit on partion 1 is sitting on partition 0 now. At what point in the boot process do you get this error? Ever see a windows splash screen or does it come right out of the bios and throw the error?

 

It comes right out of the BIOS... I never see the Windows splash. When I boot from a diskette in DOS, I see the message before the config.sys starts. So I presume it is right at the beginning.

 

Move the drive back to your external enclosure and check out the boot.ini file in the root of the dive. Post what is in the file here. Should be 2 or 3 lines.

 

Here is the boot.ini. I know the boot process will not look at the right partition (2 instead of 1) but why do I have the same message even when booting from a diskette or CD? This boot.ini located on HD Primary 1, is not even being looked at.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP dition familiale" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

 

Sorry, was getting ahead of myself. At some point we will need to tweak the partition numbers in the boot.ini from 2 to 1.

In your bios, is it set to auto detect the IDE drives or are they specified?