[Solved]Missing Hardrive, Windows won't boot?

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System repair will probably be the next thing I try, does anyone know any command prompt I might want to try like chkdsk or active partition command lines once i boot system repair? I have another hdd on the same system but if I have to reinstall windows Ill probably go with 64 bit in which case I'd have to install everything again regardless but hopefully it won't come to that...
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mysticvibes wrote:Managed to run Ubuntu on the system and works like a charm. I was able to salvage all the data from the drive which is just awesome:D. Seeing that I was able to salvage the data doesn't this mean the drive still works, so why can't windows boot up? Maybe I'm missing the boot files after all? Maybe a partition is marked as inactive where the windows is installed to? Funny thing is that in ubuntu only one drive shows up, the one with the windows installed and the other isn't showing up, but from the bios menu the exact opposite is happening. Anybody have any idea what could be going on here? Would anyone recomend some software I could run in ubuntu to solve this, maybe partition software, disk repair, disk management,, etc??
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201101/page10.html

You can get an SSD for a new windows boot drive, and have a separate linux
using the once faulty drive in a usb case, find the early boot keystroke
at startup.

Linux has several great instruments and many quality effects, you can also use Reaper in wine, hosting most non-dongled plugins that feature sane copy protection, IK, NI, U-he, Wusik, Algomusic and HG Fortune collections, and hordes of great lone-wolf products and freewares.

http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/10wt3ch/isos/

This realtime linux boots off dvd, and will prompt you to allow creating
a save file, (squashfs) you'll have a great sample grid drum machine,
16 layer synthesizer, fx, recording apps, and a wine version all set up
to install reaper, which will be like an extra rompler. Youtubes of
qjackctl, the gui for audio connections, should be common.

AVLinux has a new version recently, a much larger download,
but well maintained and updated.
Cheers

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Did you pull the motherboard battery out?
Do this (failing a HDD problem, or MBR)
Leave it out for 30 minutes.
Put it back in and reconfigure the BIOS.
Sorry I didn't read the entire thread, maybe it is data corruption.

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Once I have access to the HD via ubuntu how can I check to see if it is an MBR is in order?

I will try what you suggested camsr; any idea where the motherboard battery might be located on a p5n32-e sli? Once I do this will it wipe out the bios settings? If the drive shows up in ubuntu and i can access the files does this rule out data corruption? Peace ~Tim
High Quality Soundsets for Lush-101 | Hive | Electra 2 | Diversion | Halion | Largo | Rapid | Dune II | Thorn | and more.

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Look for a dime mounted on the motherboard.
Remove it in a static free zone. Wait a few minutes for the parts
to discharge their energies. Get a new battery, if it's a few years
old and an easy purchase. Locate a spot to mount an SSD,
for future reference.

If the drive works in linux, and you recovered your data,
check a few samples to rule out corruption, and reinstall windows.
I'm assuming ubuntu did an ext4 partition as part of its install.
Windows will redo this with ntfs partition.
What are your daw/plugin requirements, and audio interface?
maudio and e-mu pci, and many usb interfaces will work in
linux.

http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/hardware_matrix

AristX is a ubuntu with every known linux a/v software,
many gigabytes, and it works quite well on an SSD

http://artistx.org/blog/

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

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mysticvibes wrote:Once I have access to the HD via ubuntu how can I check to see if it is an MBR is in order?

I will try what you suggested camsr; any idea where the motherboard battery might be located on a p5n32-e sli? Once I do this will it wipe out the bios settings? If the drive shows up in ubuntu and i can access the files does this rule out data corruption? Peace ~Tim
That should rule out a failing HDD, but you need to do a CHKDSK (windows) at least to search for bad sectors.
My asus, the battery is hiding behind the PCI-E 16x slot, convienently behind the video card :ud:
Yeah it clears all bios settings.

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Will have to look at the manual or find some videos before I try and remove anything, I need to be 100 percent sure what I'm doing so I don't make the problem worse. I will run chkdsk as soon as I clear up my usb which now has ubuntu on it and still need to copy some files over.

At this point I'm pretty sure its not a memory issue but maybe someothing like the active partition got switched over to another drive which should be empty at this point. I did a clean reinstall a while back on a different partition and switched it to active so it could boot from it, maybe after the power outage it actually reset the bios settings back to making the other drive the active parition to boot from which was the original factory settings default. Only problem is I need to get into command prompt via recovery disk or repair disk on usb bootalbe since I obviously can't get into disk management to switch active partitions.

Does anyone knows the lines to do this in command prompt? if i remember right its something like list disk, find the disc letter, select disk... etc? If its not this then maybe I have to make a copy of the boot files and transfer them over via ubuntu???
High Quality Soundsets for Lush-101 | Hive | Electra 2 | Diversion | Halion | Largo | Rapid | Dune II | Thorn | and more.

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I had this before when I had multiboot system. Nightmare. Changing OS boot drive is the worst thing ever. There arnt any simple command lines out of this. Take a bullet. Give up on saving it - Start fresh on new HDD. It will be quicker than spending another week looking for a complex answer. three pages should tell you its not simple.

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Always dual boot from separate physical drives, lessons learned.
Always keep the boot partition C: or whatever is enumerated first.
I don't get how your computer could boot in any circumstance if the boot drive was "unselectable" from the BIOS.

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I'll add a grain of salt, since I have had the same dual-boot setup
since xp sp2, with various linux distros on the extra
partitions, for 7 or eight years. I once accidentally deleted a couple of
xp boot files, and have learned how to defeat a few linux issues,
but have not managed to ruin the intgrity and interaction
of the four partitions, despite what some linux experts would consider
herculean efforts :hihi:

Now dual booting different microsoft products on the same drive,
like xp with win7 or win8, may well be best secured by using
separate hard drives. Wouldn't surprise me at all, with their
penchant for demanding the front row seats, at all times.
(((We be Microsoft :hyper: Therefore we rock)))
Cheers

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Update: Okay finally managed to get motivated enough to try fixing this before a new 64 bit reinstall. I managed to create a windows disc repair via usb and tried fixing the master boot file via bootrec options and still a no go. Also tried to mark the partition as active via diskpart list disk list partition and still no go. Will try a few more bootrec options then will give up and do a reinstall of windows 7.

For now my main concern is how come the disk where windows 7 is installed isn't being listed in bios or select boot disk menu when the same hard drive is being read just fine in ubuntu via usb. In ubuntu all the files are there and in perfect shape. What is going on here? Also only one drive is being listed in ubuntu: the drive where windows is installed and only one drive is listed in bios; the drive where windows isn't installed? There are two drives connected to mobo. Also for whatever reason maybe the same drive is one and the same being read on both bios and ubuntu how could I determine this, is there a way to rename the drive that shows up via bios or how can i distinguish them to make sure which drive is which? I am only assuming the drive being read by bios isn't the one where windows is installed to because its not booting from there, just a blinking cursor if I select that drive to boot from.. Also One drive is showing up in ubuntu and its the windows one so why isn't the bios reading it and booting from it the way ubuntu is? This is a real mess, sorry for the confusion....
High Quality Soundsets for Lush-101 | Hive | Electra 2 | Diversion | Halion | Largo | Rapid | Dune II | Thorn | and more.

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Managed to fix it via windows 7 32 bit recovery usb via marking partition as active the simply reparing and fixing the MBR via bootrec.. From there in the repair disk utility it managed to recover the windows partition, then I just repaired the mbr again. So it seems it took some time for the repair disk utility to actually find windows 7... Hopefully this is a permanent fix but super happy right now :D Atleast through it all I managed to discover the awesomeness of ubuntu as an OS and data recovery option.. Peace ~Tim
High Quality Soundsets for Lush-101 | Hive | Electra 2 | Diversion | Halion | Largo | Rapid | Dune II | Thorn | and more.

TTU Youtube

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