Hardware bafflement

[nolly]

The PC continues to not boot from it's HD. All drives are detected in the right places. When booted from CD, the boot disk and it's OS installation are seen and accessible. (My OS install disk is the boot CD I'm using.) But when trying to boot from HD, it hangs indefinitely after "Verifying DMI Pool Data...". No error message is displayed; it just hangs. Any ideas?

Comments

Google rules

[voider.livejournal.com]

I haven't come across that problem before, but a quick Google search found some links that may be of help...

http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:zAdXJMW5oSsC:www.soyousa.com/support/index.php%3Fanswer_id%3D94+%22Verifying+DMI+Pool+Data%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000474.htm

I feel your pain. If it's one thing I hate, it's hardware issues.

What OS?

[kalei.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a bad MBR or maybe a virus. Have you tried Fdisking and re-formatting? Hopefully you have backups of your data. Also, what brand of HD is it? Have you downloaded an HD utility to check it for errors?

There could be other ways around the problem, but I'd have to take a look. I just sent you an email in response to your post in the San Diego community. Let me know if you'd like my help.

Re: What OS?

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I'm quite certain it's a hardware issue.
It's NT 4.0, but it's not getting far enough for that to matter. I let the repair procedure on the NT install CD do it's thing, which includes and MBR check, and all it did was uninstall my service packs. *grin*
It's an IBM Deskstar, and was working fine in the old system.

Re: What OS?

[kalei.livejournal.com]

Ok, well from reading your journal I can see you're very technically proficient, maybe even more than me... lol. But here are some suggestions you might not have tried yet:

IBM has a drive fitness test you could use to rule out the HD. You mentioned it ran fine in your old system, so this may be unnecessary, but you'll have it just in case. If the drive is less than 2 or 3 years old, it might even still be under warranty.

Here's a link to the DFT:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/article.php?sid=2828&cat=8

As for getting it to boot, this site has Windows NT bootdisks, but they might run into the same problem as your CD:

http://www.tech24.com/tools/bootdisk.asp

An article I just found goes over some smart steps you can take when building a system to insure nothing gets messed up:

http://www.bootdisk.com/txtfiles/service.txt

After reading some of that article, I'm reminded to ask - are you taking static precautions? Grounding yourself to the case whenever you reach inside (preferably with the power supply plugged in)? This is especially important if you're working in a carpeted room.

Hope some of that helps. Feel free to tell me to mind my own business if you want. ;)

Only because it's April Fool's Day

[baxil.livejournal.com]

(1) Reboot Windows.

(2) Reinstall Windows.

(3) Call Microsoft tech support. Return to step (1).

;)

Re: Only because it's April Fool's Day

[(Anonymous)]

I had a similar problem moving a hard drive from one PC to a newer one. Believe it or not, it turned out the BIOS on the old PC didn't properly detect the HDD (even though it worked fine) and when I put it in the new PC the BIOS pulled up the drive fine, but I had data inconsistencies until I fdisked and reformatted on the new PC. The only indicator I had of any problems was that I got a warning about it during a RedHat 7.3 installation on the old machine. Go figure...

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

doublecheck your cables; I had the same prob, I had somehow plugged it in incorrectly (at the plug). Luckily, no data was destroyed.