Which one did Windows use to boot? Of course, this is assuming that the physical drive Windows used to boot is the same physical drive that contains the MBR. Now, I get the mapping from Logical Drive to Physical Drive and I discover that there are two physical drives used by that volume. Now, that means we have at least two physical drives. Assume that C: is using a mirrored RAID setup. Knowing which logical volume Windows used to boot doesn't help me here. On the other hand, a logical drive is identified by a string of the form, "\\.\x" where x is a drive letter.Įdit to discuss a few of the ideas that were thrown out. This indicates that some error occurred when trying to write the new partition table out to the fixed disk. Physical disk drives are of the form "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVEx" where x is a number. The way I want to identify the device is with a string which will identify a physical disk drive (as opposed to a logical disk drive). A hard disk sector on a BIOS PC is typically 512 bytes (but moving to 4,096 bytes see Chapter 9 for more information). On my dev box I have two hard disks, and when I look at the contents of the first couple of sectors on either of the hard disks I have a standard boiler plate MBR. Physical disks are addressed in units known as sectors. Just reading the first sectors of the hard disk isn't reveling anything. In other words, I need a way from Windows to determine which drive the BIOS is using to boot the whole system.ĭoes Windows expose an interface to discover this? With how big the Windows API is, I'm hoping there is something buried in there that might do the trick. If not what are my options, if any to salvage this laptop HDD without replacing it.I'm need to find a method to programmatically determine which disk drive Windows is using to boot. Jester at 22:47 Jester given that SPT is 18, probably on a floppy that likely won t support extended disk functions / LBA (although other types of drives would support it -CDROM/Hard disks etc). Is there any HDD test check under windows or any such tools windows/linux based ewhere which can identify the bad sectors of the HDD and 'lock/isolate' them from further read-write access of any kind. 23 1 4 It will go to sector 1 on the next head, then the next cylinder. I am inclined to think HDD has not failed fully or crashed but has developed bad sectors.Įlse if it was a HDD crash, it would have refused to boot at all let alone install on it. Looks like while it is in use, it accesses the bad sectors for storing some data and that's when it bombs. But same white screen and freeze happened. I just formatted one partition which installed Windows So in effect HDD has not undergone a full format here. When I start my laptop I get black screen saying 'Multiple active partitions' and below it says 'No Bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key'. I did not have to format one data partition which has my data. 0 I am facing an issue during boot with my Acer Aspire E 15 with 4gb ram. All errors are written to the session log in either case. Installed fine, and works fine as well.ĭue to unavailability of WiFi/ Ethernet driver for that adapters under Ubuntu( at least I could not configure them and get the networking working at all), I decided to go back to reinstall windows Vista. Boot Disk to a bootable CD, DVD or USB mass storage device, select the. the MBR almost always loads the first sector of the active partition. Then redid the Ubuntu installation, this time asked to to install the Ubuntu on /dev/sda3. This hard drive is known as the boot device, startup disk, or drive 0 and. Our goal is to create world’s leading data recovery, security and backup solutions by providing rock solid performance, innovation, and unparalleled customer service. It again gave error and could not install grub loader on /dev/sda1. is a privately owned North American software company. Select the drive that refuses to boot, right click on it and in the context menu choose Edit Boot. It listed 3 partitions /dev/sda1, sda2, sda2. Once in the Boot Disk environment click on Active Undelete. (I confirmed this later by further tests mentioned below) Some sectors or platters have gone bad on the disk. Hard disk test returned an error saying something like - "Replace the hard disk". To diagnose I did run the Memory and Hard disk check which is present in the Bios Setup. Hard reboot works.Īgain it works for some 2 hrs or so, same error. While working fine, its screen goes white or sometimes some thin black lines horizontally. After 4.5+ years of usage, just recently it started malfunctioning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |