Lee@DVDDebate
2004-12-20 01:08:15 UTC
I've just had a very strange problem after installing a webcam driver.
Upon completion the driver required a reboot, so off it all went. When
the machine came back up XP appeared to be booting OK, but then stopped
and went in to a boot loop. Upon closer inspection it seems there is a
blue screen with an error message appearing, but it flashes up way too
fast for me to read before it starts to reboot again and I'm not sure
how to turn the auto-reboot off in order to read it. BIOS somewhere, maybe?
Anyway, I tried booting to safe mode with no joy, then decided to
reinstall XP. XP install disc gets to the 'choose your drive to install
to' page and it lists my C drive but with no file system listed. Other
drives in the machine all show as NTFS. Odd, and not a little worrying.
Is the drive trashed, I wonder?
I spend a few minutes switching drives and jumpers around and eventually
get XP up and running on a whole new drive. My old drive is now slaved
as F: and, lo and behold, XP can see it fine and has identified it as
having an NTFS file system with all the files are still there and in
working order. A disc scan shows no errors on the disc.
Odd. So I switch everything back and try to boot from the old drive
again. No luck. Try XP install again and once more the install routine
says there is no file system on that drive.
I switch again, thinking I can just get the install app to re-install XP
on to the drive when it shows up as F:.
Still no good. Even when slaved, the XP install disc cannot find a file
system and insists that if I want XP on that drive it will need to be
completely reformatted. Which, considering it's a 100Gb drive with only
2% space left, I'm not really that keen to do.
I'm now completely stumped. Can anybody offer any suggestions as to what
to try next?
Thanks,
Lee.
Upon completion the driver required a reboot, so off it all went. When
the machine came back up XP appeared to be booting OK, but then stopped
and went in to a boot loop. Upon closer inspection it seems there is a
blue screen with an error message appearing, but it flashes up way too
fast for me to read before it starts to reboot again and I'm not sure
how to turn the auto-reboot off in order to read it. BIOS somewhere, maybe?
Anyway, I tried booting to safe mode with no joy, then decided to
reinstall XP. XP install disc gets to the 'choose your drive to install
to' page and it lists my C drive but with no file system listed. Other
drives in the machine all show as NTFS. Odd, and not a little worrying.
Is the drive trashed, I wonder?
I spend a few minutes switching drives and jumpers around and eventually
get XP up and running on a whole new drive. My old drive is now slaved
as F: and, lo and behold, XP can see it fine and has identified it as
having an NTFS file system with all the files are still there and in
working order. A disc scan shows no errors on the disc.
Odd. So I switch everything back and try to boot from the old drive
again. No luck. Try XP install again and once more the install routine
says there is no file system on that drive.
I switch again, thinking I can just get the install app to re-install XP
on to the drive when it shows up as F:.
Still no good. Even when slaved, the XP install disc cannot find a file
system and insists that if I want XP on that drive it will need to be
completely reformatted. Which, considering it's a 100Gb drive with only
2% space left, I'm not really that keen to do.
I'm now completely stumped. Can anybody offer any suggestions as to what
to try next?
Thanks,
Lee.