Shuttle SN42G won't boot to Windows

Disaster. This morning my main PC sat at pre-post screen and froze.

Last night I plugged in my Nokia 5800 cellfone without software installed and downloaded some images to the PC without problem. I suspect this has altered the boot drive settings or numbering somehow.

After much faffing around I can access the bios selected defaults... nothing
F8 select safe mode pc freezes at driver sys/mup ?

I have tried last known configuration and also FIXBOOT ....nothing

Won't boot from CD so can't use repair

I have the drive slaved on other PC and I have backed up and I can see the whole HDD .

What can I do to repair the boot sector and or repair windows ? Can I just copy the whole of windows from a CD and replace whats on the C/ drive ?

I would greatly appreciate any help or advice as this is my main PC and it has all my life on it

Shuttle SN42G XP Pro 1gb DDR400 80Gb HDD

 

first i would test the drive out with the diagnostic tool from the manufacturer of the drive (seagate, maxtor, hitachi, etc)

a list of them can be found here:
http://majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html
once you know that the drive is physically ok, you will need to boot from the cd in order to reinstall windows, or repair

you say it wont boot from the cd, but when you reset the bios to defaults it re-sorts the boot order to default, and probably doesnt have it to go from the cd first. You will have to enter the bios again and set it to boot from the cd first. Or, your computer might give you a prompt during boot up (usually around the same time it prompts you to hit del to enter bios) to open a boot menu or something like that.

 

thanks but after a traumatic 16 hours work I finaly got the drive back up and running.
Nothing wrong with the drive itself . It slaved fine and was recognised on 3x identical Shuttle PCs

I tried setting bios to boot from only CD no joy tried fixboot chkdsk etc etc nothing
Eventually I worked through the bios step by step and it finally booted.Phew

Have since ghosted the drive.

I reckon it must have heard me talking about upgrading to a new machine Sunday :-D