Missing NTLDR, trying to repair Windows XP, having partition problems

[just-sumguy]

I have an asus eee pc 1005hab with windows xp (sp3).

So I havent been able to boot windows and was getting the NTLDR missing message. I hooked up a external dvd drive and tried booting from a copy of XP home (sp2) in attempt to repair windows. I get windows set up to run and try to install windows but I have gotten the following message:

"The partition is either full, damaged, not formatted, or formatted with an incomparable file system. To continue installing windows setup must format this partition."

C: partition1 [unknown] 147581 mb (147581 free 0 on 152626 mb disk 0 at 0 on bus 0 on atapi [mbr]



So my question is, is there something I can do to repair the partition with out having to format/wipe out the info thats already on it?

 

[Tmagic650]

These symptoms are telling you that the hard drive is bad. There's really is no way you can use it the way you want. The best thing to do is to get another drive and install Windows fresh including all the Windows Updates and computer's drivers. Then either get a USB enclosure or install the old drive a a second drive and try to recover your files that way

 

[just-sumguy]

Any other suggestions?

 

[Tmagic650]

Trust me, the hard drive is BAD, but you may be able to recover files from it later, as I said

 

[just-sumguy]

Well I got a usb harddrive adapter and hooked my netbooks drive to my desktop. The drive shows up as Local Disk F: but when I try to access it I get the following message:

"F:\ Is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"


So is there any other options or steps I can take?

 

[Tmagic650]

Does the drive spin up, make any noise or vibration? If not, it is gone for sure

 

[just-sumguy]

Ya its getting power and I can feel it vibrating/spinning.

 

[Tmagic650]

The logic circuitry is probably toast rather than a mechanical failure

 

[just-sumguy]

Well I tried running chkdsk on it and got the following:

The type of the file system is NTFS
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? <y/n>

 

[Tmagic650]

"Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?"...

Say YES and when you start up the computer Chkdsk will run

 

[just-sumguy]

I said yes to chkdsk and restarted, but all it did was scan the C drive.

 

[Tmagic650]

Did you select attempt to repair bad sectors, and is this the "bad" hard drive you have been dealing with?

 

[just-sumguy]

No. The drive Im trying to repair is the drive from a netbook. I hooked it up to my desktop PC using a usb hard drive adapter in an attempt to retrieve the files off of it.

It shows up as drive F. I ran chkdsk on drive F: and thats when it asked to run it on restart cause it was busy. So when I rebooted all that happened was it scanned my C drive (desktop).

 

[Tmagic650]

Yes, I think chkdsk only scans C drives. You may be able to get some drive testing software from it's manufacturers website that works inside windows