Unable to repair XP or boot to HDD

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Heya.
My PC just stopped dead one day and I've had no luck restoring it.
The PC goes through the BIOS, POST, hangs at detecting IDE drives and then goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner.
I've been able to boot to my XP install cd and then select 'repair' but when it gets to 'starting windows' I get a blue screen with the error 'page_fault_in_nonpaged_area' and it mentions 'partmgr.sys'.
I've swapped out RAM, the floppy drive, the HDD, the ribbon cables. No change.
I've been able to boot from a floppy but *only* if the HDD isn't connected even though I've set the floppy to boot first.
Another thing I've noticed is that once in a while when it's detecting the Drives it won't detect the HDD unless I go into the BIOS and manually have it autodetect it.
I'm going crazy here. Any ideas?
 
Hi Sanguinis and welcome to the TS Forum


It sounds like either the PSU isnt supplying enough power to the board or the board itself is faulty.

If you have access to another PC try swapping the PSU over and try again, the fact that the PC doesnt always see a drive that you say is OK is a sign that something is definately wrong.

Regards
 
Actually, I bought a new PSU after my PC went out initially thinking that was the problem since I couldn't get anything to power on initially.
When my first power supply went out is it possible it fried my MB with it's final breath?
 
i personally think, u have a bad partition.check your hdd with a good Partition check or boot in safemode with Command prompt, then when u successfully login, run this command at the command prompt c:/> sfc /scannow. Wish u luck
 
If you have anything on that drive you really need, slave it soon and get it backed up.

Most of what I have read about that combination of errors points to a failing drive.


:)
 
Ok. So I hooked up my drive as a slave to my other working PC to see if I could salvage some data. It wouldn't boot while the drive was attached even as a slave...
Also, it would hang while detecting the drives and wouldn't detect the slave; I had to enter the bios and hit the autodetect manually (isn't that what it's doing on it's own?!) and it would recognize the drive. But, restart, and still no boot.
I got some stuff about 'verifying DMI pool data' and then it said 'boot failure' and asked for a system disk. When I removed the slave everything started up fine. Craziness.
It's like because it's hanging up it won't even let the master boot.
And since the drive won't get recognized I can't even run a disk check utility.
I should also mention that there are actually 2 HDD's that I'm having trouble with that were slave and master in the broken system. I think it's weird that they both failed and both have the same symptoms.
 
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