Help!! Strange Problem?

[rseven]

Okay, I built a new rig today with my notorious MSI K8N Neo2. Here are the particulars.
Opteron 144 cooled with XP90 and Panaflo Med Speed 92mm
2x512 PQI Turbo PC 4000 TCCD
160gig WD SATA hard drive
Enermax EG465P VE
2 Optical drives and a floppy

Okay, every piece of gear with the exception of the Opti is used and in good working order. The hard drive was in my NF2 rig so, I figure I can get away with just a Windows repair install. Everything goes great. In fact, windows runs fine without the repair, so I figure I'll do that tomorrow and in the meantime I test drive it. I know the board and the ram, so there is no question of what they can do. The only variable is the CPU. I take it all the way up to 9x300 and run about 20 minutes of Prime and Super Pi 16m. Everything is fine. I back it down to 9x250 with my ram running at 1:1 at stock speed and settings. It's chugging along fine, when I decide to run some Sandra test. I check out bandwidth and then just run one of those simple system reports, not a benchmark. The system freezes. I go to reboot and I get a hard drive failure notification! I run some quick WD diagnostics and of course it passes. I decide to to a Windows repair install and it finds the drive sans it's old partitioned and says the is unformatted? WTF!!! How could this happen? Is the hard drive failing? What could cause everything to get wiped out in an instant? Any insight on this would be helpful. Thanks.

 

[Dukeman]

Have you tried using the repair console to run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT? Can you try the drive on another system to see if it can see the partitions?

Generally anything less that a wipe of the first 63 sectors should not make a drive look unformatted or unpartitioned.

 

[rseven]

I never use the recovery console. I know it takes me to a DOS screen at the C prompt. Can you tell me more about what I'd need to do? (I'm a DOS idiot!)

 

[Dukeman]

I've used the Recovery Console before but do not remember it in detail. Here are some steps from Microsoft

From the Setup CD-ROM

1. Insert the Setup compact disc (CD) and restart the computer. If prompted, select any options required to boot from the CD.

2. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts; choose the repair or recover option by pressing R.

3. If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot system, choose the installation that you need to access from the Recovery Console.

4. When prompted, type the Administrator password.

5. At the system prompt, type Recovery Console commands; type help for a list of commands, or help commandname for help on a specific command.

6. To exit the Recovery Console and restart the computer, type exit.

FixBoot C: This will rewrite the partition information for partition C: Not including a partition or volume will rewrite the system partiton you are logged into (usually C: )

FixMBR \Device\HardDisk0 This will rewrite the master boot record on the specified drive. If you do not specify a drive it will rewrite the MBR on the volume you are logged into.

Hope this helps

 

[rseven]

Thank you, but it's all for nothing. I tried the drive on my other comp and it's unformatted and there is nothing there! I have nevber encopuntered anything like this before. I have already reformatted and reinstalled XP. I really lost stuff I didn't have backed up for the first time in years. I never thought I'd lose the partitions and everythng on them to anything but drive failure. Live and burn!

 

[Dukeman]

Sorry to hear that