[Tjcrazy]

I brought a new hard drive and it arrived 2 days ago. It was a 7200rpm and 160gb HD. I tried to RAID0 it with another 5200rpm, 160gb HD. Something in that process went terribly wrong, because I could not start up windows because of a stupid:
'Disk Boot Error, Please Insert System Disk And Press Enter'
Error. I then de-RAIDED (A new word ) the two hard drives and formatted them. I then kept trying to boot into windows (Which is still on a non-formatted 180gb drive). I've checked all the cabling and wires etc.
I then try the Windows XP Recovery disk, I run chkdisk -r on the drive, it reports everything OK. SO I then try BOOTCFG /rebuild it says it cannot read/write the disk and to run chkdsk. I run chkdsk again, it reports it as OK. SO I am stuck in an infinite loop... :'(
I decide that play time is over, and get my ubuntu 8.10 cd out and install that on the 5200rpm, 160gb HD. I can instantly see the 180gb HD and mount it, with no errors. I can see all my files, open and there all 100% OK. . I can even watch a 3gb HQ movie on it with no trouble.
Now I am thinking... Hmmm, whats the trouble here then. I then see that the drive has no BOOT.INI file at the root. I don't know how to fix that, so I run sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs and run sudo e2fsck /dev/sdb1 (the 180gb HD) it reports it has bad superblocks. Now, I am REALLY confused.

Can you amazingly gifted OCers help me? I can read all the files but I cannot boot OR successfully e2fsck the HD (180gb). All I want to do is boot into windows.
Before people ask, I cant back anything up since I dont have any External HDs atm (Only a 4gb Pen Drive)

I brought the Hard Drive hear, so I hope you people can help me!

Tim

[lotuseclat79]

Hi Tjcrazy,

First things first. NTFS file systems have no superblocks as in Linux ext3/2 file systems, i.e. it is a different file system. Superblocks are unique to Unix/Linux.

Windows cannot be both installed and be contained on a non-formatted disk.

The one command you need to run first from your ubuntu 8.10 Live CD, i.e. you did not need to install it to do useful work, is:
$ sudo fdisk -l
from a regular user account, e.g. ubuntu
# fdisk -l
from the root acount.

By running fdisk -l command, it is easy to confirm that NTFS file system is present. If it were possible for it to exist (which it is not) inside a so-called non-formatted region of a disk, it would not show up.

Paste the full output of the fdisk -l command in this thread.

Also, your best bet to restore things to your Windows installation is to follow the signature links for member saikee's posts - search for his posts if you want to find all of his posts in this forum.

It sounds to me like you need to do a fix /mbr on the Windows disk.

-- Tom