Machine booting problem

[s0me0ne]

Alright boys and girls Im stumped. I rebooted my machine last night (there gos my winxp 3 1/2 uptime) and now she wont boot at all. My harddrive is a 250gig SATA drive, Ive resetup everything in the bois about 100 times. Ive googled reconfigured my hardware. Removed hardware, tryd to boot from xp/linux install disks, and tryd to boot a live mini/pcoked linux distro (slax!) the problem is it sees my HDD, it auto detects my hard drive. The drive is set to ide0 master. When it boots it gets past all the bios checks and right when it would eather boot from CD/HDD it reboots. Im stumped, ive beeing doing everything I can to get things back up and running. If you ask what ive done since my last reboot Ive done a million things. Ask me what ever you want but Ive done close to everything I can. I would just reinstall but it wont even boot to CD/DVD. Ive checked out my SATA boot setups and tryd them all. A fellow nerd needs some insite. heh, good thing ive got 6 computers in the house. Thanks in advance for any light you guys can shed on this.

 

[BASSMASTER]

I was going to say boot to the recovery console and try fixmbr and fixboot from there.....


but if you can't boot from a cd I guess that won't help much....


Did you try re-setting your bios, and then try to boot from a cd?

 

[s0me0ne]

Yes I did, many times. Thats what makes this so strange. Ive restored all the defaults, resetup everything and still cant boot anything. I thought it was my hard drive but it seems I cant even boot from CD, which is the second in the boot order. Im running out of ideas.

 

[joshd]

doesnt cd need to 1st in the boot order?

 

[s0me0ne]

yeah it does. it did, Im left wondering if my Sata controller doesnt work on some strange level. If I boot with slax. i live linux distro I can access the drive. It just wont boot. HELP! Im out of ideas hahaha

 

[ph0rn]

Try booting with the bare minimum hardware. If it boots up, then keep adding 1 component at at time until you get the problem again. If the first boot still doesn't work then.... you're screwed for now until we think of something else.

 

[s0me0ne]

Damnit I did that! guess Ill have to by a cheap sata controller to find out for sure. I just putu in an ide drive and it boots windows fine, yet when i try and install linux on it the install says the drive is busy. Any ideas? heh, last question before Im done with this thread!! promis!