Boot Sector Issues!

I got my HP Pavilion PC about 1 1/2 years ago. very recently, i've had some queer events happen. My registry has corrupted 4 times, and the new wave of booting problems is very odd.

The HP screen flashed, then I got an ugly boot failure error:

No operating system was detected. Strike any key to reboot.

I almost fainted as I knew this drive had no bad sectors. My boot floppy only got me an "Error reading from Drive A ". The system would bring up a
"Non-System disk or disk error" when I tried recovery and boot CDs.

So in desparation I tried my XP installation boot-disks in an attempt to pull up the recovery consule. "Setup could not locate the EULA" *@(#&@*!

Eventually, the system took a CD with the recovery consule and I used the fixboot command to overwrite the bootsector. To my relief, the system booted normally.

Since then, it's happened 4 times!

I've scandisked the drive only to find no bad sectors and windows operates normally, but the bootsector keeps corrupting!

Any help?

 

Sounds like an intermittent hardware failure. Check all connectors, unplug & replug to exercise the contacts. If no joy, move on to substituting a different HD.

 

Check your hard drive manufacturer's website, there is usually a free diagnostic tool you can download and run. Also back up any critical files you have on that hard drive while you can still access it (the drive may be failing).

B

 

Okay, so after backing up all my pictures and documents, I found out the root of my problem. Luckily this 120GB isn't failing as my brother confessed to shutting down the computer when the HD light was solid! He doesn't seem to care but now there seems to be no more boot problems now that i've told him to not to do that. Just to be safe, I'm gonna buy a dual layer DVD+-RW to backup stuff bigger than 700MB.

 

Aha! That's a well known problem. The old intermittent brother corruption syndrome. Twenty lashes with a wet noodle should fix that.