Windows 2000 won't boot Help

nice343

So I installed windows server 2000 and for some reason today it won't boot.

went to setup to reapir it and it told me "unformatted or damaged disk". What do I do?

blargoe

Something has gone wrong with your disk it appears that has caused the windows installation to become corrupted. You will probably have to reinstall.

Are you sure the disk is good?

JDMurray

Did you perform the installation on blank, unpartitioned hard drive or on a drive that was already partitioned?

Windows 2000 has problems being installed into partitions created by 3rd-party programs like GParted and Partition Magic. It also doesn't like being installed into an pre-existing partition that was created as "Dynamic." It's best to start with an unformatted hard drive (wiped using DBAN) and let FDISK in the Windows 2000 setup do all the partitioning structuring.

mgeorge

Well first off give us some info, is this disk in a raid array (hardware or software?) is it independant? what make/model is the server? Is the hdd ide? scsi? u160? u320? if scsi, is the chain properly terminated?

Make sure you have no software overlays on the disk's mbr. Was this drive participating in a dynamic volume?

Also is this machine an IBM? Their is a setting in IBM bios called "boot partition" and gives you options "visable, or hidden" if its hidden then it requires a 3 party external bootstrap thus rendering such an error. Also IBM's have a diag ROM which boots to PCDOS 7.0 (if you have latest diag rom) and uses PC Doctor. This diag can be very handy

If this is a dell then dell has diags avaliable at http://www.dell.com/support you can burn the diag to a blank, i beleive they come in a ISO, or you can download the partition manager to create the factory diag partition (not recommended on a server)

Any who I'm hitting the sack, im tired from dismantling my ibm x330 only to find out someone jimmy rigged it with a green wire (laughs)