Windows Cannot Boot without...Mobo driver CD? o.O

[Jarik :: Tentsu]

I have a rather interesting problem recently.

After my friends hard drive managed to cause my NTUSER.DAT to be corrupted (through constant crashing), I decided to nuke my installation and reinstall.

To give you a bit of background my mobo is Gigabyte 8IPE1000Pro2, I've got an Intel Northwood 2.6GHz (800Mhz) OCed to 3.1GHz quite stably. In terms of my setup? My Windows system is on my first channel IDE. Now this system is one I built and has gone through about 4-5 reformats and works quite happily (been running since late 2004 with upgrades throughout the way).

Recently I installed Mandriva onto another SATA channel and decided to use LiLO as my boot loader. When I reinstalled Windows, obviously I assumed that the Windows Boot Loader would overwrite it and take priority.

Anyways, after reinstalling, configuring and tweaking all my progs, I suddenly noticed my computer wouldn't boot. After POST it would go to the next screen and just wait there - as if there was no boot loader or anything.

For some reason, by having my Gigabyte drivers and utilities CD in my second optical drive, it comes to that boot section and then asks "Boot from CD? Hit any key" (or whatever). Should I hit a key, it comes to a Gigabyte backup program thingy. If I don't hit anything, after a while it mentions a "1.44MB Floppy" or something and then boots into Windows perfectly fine.

Previously I had not noticed it for a while, cause I had two optical drives and my driver CD was sitting in the second one for quite some time.

Now I'm not 100% sure on this, but its possible during the installation phase, I had the XP Installation CD in the first drive and the Driver CD in the second drive.

This works if my Boot priority is HDD then CD, or CD then HDD - doesn't make a difference.

Any ideas? Ways of installing my Boot Loader?

Is it possible the existence of LiLO on my other HDD caused this problem (I have since reformatted that HDD due to need of temporary HDD space...these days 830GB doesn't cut it. =P. So yeah, can't get back LiLo or logs on that drive).


Thanks, ^^
~Jarik

 

[RyanS]

So after reformatting it does or does not work? FDISK /MBR should fix if not.

 

[Jarik :: Tentsu]

So after reformatting it does or does not work? FDISK /MBR should fix if not.

Well after the nuke and reformat, it does not work without the driver CD.

I'll try "FDISK /MBR" then. Just to confirm, that just rewrites the MBR yes? Doesn't actually reformat the rest of the drive? (Cause I really want to avoid spending another 10+ hours reformatting, reinstalling, reconfiguring and tweaking everything...though I guess I could always just back up my Registry Hives and all that to make it easier...)

Any idea why this problem might have occurred?

Thanks,
~Jarik

 

[EricB]

your other boot.record is on the second drive. sticking a windows xp cd in will automatically bypass that boot and look for the regular one that on the primary ide drive.

fix the mbr or delete the boot record on the other drive

 

[Jarik :: Tentsu]

Okay, it ended up as a 'it fixed itself' problem through a rather strange way.


I tried, going to XP Setup CD's recovery console and trying fixmbr (fdisk /mbr apparently) and fixboot commands. Neither yielded a result. I tried a chkdsk /F on my XP drive on boot - also didn't yield a result except fixing a couple of bad sectors.

I used 'diskpart' (Windows XP's equivalent of fdisk) and marked my XP drive as 'active' and my old LiLO drive as 'inactive'. No result there.

To make sure there wasn't something wrong with the actual boot sector on my XP drive as opposed to the problem being the boot sector on the former 'LiLO' drive, I removed the IDE connector to that and booted. Of course, it went to Windows fine. (Btw, if I hadn't mentioned before, they're on the same IDE channel, the XP one being the Master).

I reconnected the Slave and booted...and it worked fine. =O

So yeah, thanks for all your help! ^^
~Jarik