Slaved HD keeps Master from booting, even to Safe Mode

[jackj]

Have a Western Digital that stopped booting. It hangs at the Windows XP spash screen, with the scroll bar running beneath it. When trying to boot to safe mode, it hangs as it's loading .sys files from the drivers folder (last one listed is amdagp.sys). I can see it in the bios, and I've run a WD diagnostic tool and another one on it and they say it's fine. I'm guessing the MBR might need fixing. But the real problem is I put it in another system as a slave and it keeps that one from booting up, too. Same problem with getting to safe mode and a prompt, except that it hangs at agpcpq.sys. Any thoughts, on at least being able to access it from a prompt so I could try to repair it, or at least save the data?

 

[gwhite]

Check to see if the master is set as master or cable select. If cable select jumper your drive cable select. The bios on the backup computer might not be seeing your drive correctly and is hanging on the boot process. Also have you tried booting off the XP installation disk and trying a repair? Toms hardware has a guide that might be of some help. http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050112/index.html

 

[jackj]

Unfortunately, I've done them both as cable select and as Master/Slave, with same results. Unable to do a Recover, either. It hangs at "examining 5800 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on Atapi..."

 

[gwhite]

Have you tried putting the drive back in the original machine and boot from the cd to do a repair of the windows xp install?

 

[jackj]

Yeah, that's what I meant by Recover; the Recovery Console. It hangs when it tries to execute it. It appears that it first checks the drive for errors, but hangs as soon as it starts to do that, with the above "examining 5880 Disk 0..." showing at the bottom. It's been suggested elsewhere that I run checkdisk and fixboot, but I can't do either until I can get to a dos prompt, and trying to get there is when I get stuck at loading amdagp.sys, or whichever .sys is after that.

 

[gwhite]

Have you tried a boot disk? http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm for XP

 

[jackj]

I had been trying a CD boot disk from Ultimate Boot Disc.com, I think. It has a ton of utilities, one of which was able to examine the disc and say it was fine. I now did try a floppy from your link, too, and I got a different error enroute to booting to safe mode: hal.dll was missing or corrupt. Same result, though; still can't get to a prompt to try to repair it.
Additionally, I bought a hard drive enclosure so I could hot swap it, and it still doesn't get appropriately recognized on my other computer. When I first hooked it up, it showed in the SysTray that a new device was found and recognized it as a WD 60GB, but nothing in My Computer, and every time since it just slows down the computer to a crawl; and I mean CRAWL! So that I have to re-boot. Can't even get the Task Manager up. Another hard drive in the enclosure; no problem. New drive letters pop right up in My Computer. I'm stumped.

 

[gwhite]

As much as I hate to say it, you might be further ahead buying a new drive for that machine, install XP, and then hook that problem drive to your secondary controller and try to get your data off it. You could borrow someones spare old drive and get your data, then format your present drive and transfer the date back. Good luck!