Just a preface: I'm training to be an A+ cert. technician, so the below are some questions that I have that I cannot ask to another cert. technician because I don't know any. After looking through other technical help sites, yours seemed to be the best (Well, at least one of the more intelligent moderators, who isn't egomaniacle, and condesending)

1. First PC:

I have a similar problem with the rebooting issue...however, this is how my case differs:

I have a working HD which has been freshly installed with winxp home on another pc

I have removed all other devices (no pci cards, no ide devices) the only things connected to the mobo are, cpu, ram, hd, everything else is onboard

The RAM tests out to the right size, the bios detects the HD and it's the right size, however, when it gets to the boot choices, and I choose anything (including safe mode) the pc reboots itself

I have tried a different stick of ram in the same slot, but not the second slot...(I will be trying that...and get back to you on that one)...I'm not sure if the RAM I've tried is compatible with that mobo (it's 256MB of DDR400 I haven't looked for the model # yet to determine what kind of ram it's compatible with)...if it's the wrong ram, would it still boot, and run through the ram size detected sequence?

the only other thing i can think of is the cpu or the mobo...i've looked into the bios, and nothing looks amiss there. however, there is no cpu monitoring utility built into the bios, so i don't know if it could be an overheating issue, or a damaged cpu...

BTW, this computer is not mine, it came to me with my friend came to it with me with the vague description that it was "acting funny"...when I turned the power on, I had determined that his old HD was nearing death (the read head was making that "I'm nearing death" clicking sound) sounded like it was hammering against the side of the hard drive enclosure!

2. Second PC:

The other question that I have is when I'm doing a command such as this to preserve a persons files:
xcopy c:\docume~1 d: \s (d: being the secondary backup drive)
I noticed that dos truncated all the file/folder names to the default 8 characters...is there a way to preserve the original file/folder name?
*Note: the reason that this procedure was followed was the persons HD loaded into windows but explorer would keep opening and closing itself because of a virus, and my panda titanium 2006 couldn't find the virus on the boot scan that it does.

2. Third PC:

This is a hard drive issue. This hard drive was scanned with a utility (and by a person that didn't know what they were doing at all!) which has since caused this hard drive to be not bootable. I have used put it as a slave drive, the bios detects, but windows doesn't...after reading a great article at http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139
I ended up trying a data recovery tool (because I wasn't sure what had happened, bad sectors, system file missing, etc.) It was a windows based tool which found the HD in question, and said there was some bad sectors (not sure if there actually were or if this software is fear mongering, i.e. norton utilities).
I understand that before trying to fix the problem, I should troubleshoot it more slowly...
What is the logical place to start with this one?

Some quick replies. Let us know if they are relevant or if we've missed the mark & thanks for the kind words btw!

1. You have to install or repair install XP onto the motherboard that will use it.

2. Using quotation marks might help: http://www.allenware.com/mcsw/bus.htm#LongFileNames

3. I would first off run the manufacturers diagnostic on this drive. The major brands represented here: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

1. missed the mark...the HD that is attached to the system is a brand new HD with winxp home on it, it boots normally on any other pc I've tested it on...so I'm not sure if it's the cpu, mobo, or ram that is causing the rebooting issue

2. Problem solved!?great website I've just tried the quotation marks by doing the following (and it worked!,
no filename truncation, I'll have to test it one more time in native DOS, but it should work there just the same
as a DOS box in winxp home right?):
in winxp home I opened a dos window and typed the following;
xcopy c:\docume~1\david\*.* "c:\documents and settings\david\new" /s
YAY!

3. I haven't run the utility on the Maxtor drive yet, but I will tomorrow and follow up to let you guys and the rest of the internet world know.

3. PowerMax is a good utility: http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

2. Cool! Glad it worked!

1.

I have a working HD which has been freshly installed with winxp home on another pc

The point I was pointing to is that in general you need to install XP onto the hard drive while that hard drive is on the motherboard that will use it.
Why it worked on other computers I cannot say unless the boards were very similar to the installation board.
Anyway unless you feel certain of a hardware issue I would try to run a Clean or Repair Install on the board in question.

3. I guess the reason that I did not install winxp home while this HD was attached to this PC was because it kept doing a corrupt installation (error screens saying it couldn't read the disk, and that it was looking for particular files), however, using the same cd, it was okay on the other pc...not sure if it's the cdrom, the cpu, ram, or mobo...but I've taken pre-installed drives before and placed them with any PC...when you boot, winxp removes the old drivers, and automatically detects all the new hardware, this is the first time it didn't work.

3. okay, have had a chance to run the maxtor powermax utility, and found that there was no partition information when the "installation confirmation" test was run. All the other "installation confirmation" tests were run and passed. Then I ran an advanced "full scan" and it gave me a 8 character error code which maxtors site says "get a new hard drive"...however I'm not prepared to accept that because there is much useful data on this hard drive.

if the fact that I'm getting this error code is because there is no partition, how do I restore the partition without losing the data on the drive?

I have found some information about the windows recovery console, some questions that I have about it:

a) bootcfg, fixboot, fixmbr: these commands assume that when I run recovery console through DOS that the console has detected the drive, however, it hasn't.
the bios knows the drive is there, when I boot it as a secondary HD, windows detects the drive in the device manager, but on the "Volumes" tab, all the information is blank, and clicking on the "populate" button gives an error message...I understand that this is all from that partition being corrupted or missing...

so I guess my question is how to I repair a corrupted partition or create a new on without removing any data on the HD when the recovery console will not even detect the drive?

okay, my bad, rocovery console did detect the HD when it was the only one attached to the mobo...

i tried "dir" command at the c:\ prompt, and got: "an error occurred during directory enumeration"

i tried bootcfg /rebuild and bootcfg /add, they gave me an error indicating that I should run "ckhdsk" first

after running "chkdsk" i got an error indicating that it could not read the drive...

i tried fixboot, it said "are you sure you want to write a new bootsector to the partition c:"
if i do that, will i damage any existing files? i.e. my documents folder? etc.?

i ran the fixboot utility, and said yes to the question about writing a new bootsector to the partition c:

the results were:
fat file system detected, writing new bootsector

it successfully wrote the new bootsector...upon booting it as a secondary HD (incidentally it's a 40GB HD) windows showed it as a 10MB HD with 7.95MB free (and the HD was blank, even with the show system files option checked)...I'm assuming it created a secondary partition?
I'm going to wait for your response before I proceed.

Originally Posted by lancelot

2. Third PC:

This is a hard drive issue. This hard drive was scanned with a utility (and by a person that didn't know what they were doing at all!) which has since caused this hard drive to be not bootable. I have used put it as a slave drive, the bios detects, but windows doesn't...after reading a great article at http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139
I ended up trying a data recovery tool (because I wasn't sure what had happened, bad sectors, system file missing, etc.) It was a windows based tool which found the HD in question, and said there was some bad sectors (not sure if there actually were or if this software is fear mongering, i.e. norton utilities).
I understand that before trying to fix the problem, I should troubleshoot it more slowly...
What is the logical place to start with this one?

I really don't know what I can add here. The PCSTATS guide appears to be worth exploring further.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139

I will move this to the hardware section where other eyes might find a fresh approach.