[LordOpie]

To boot, I had to go to "Boot Sequence"(?), it's F12 as the computer is starting up. I manually selected "Boot from primary".

Why? How do I get it to auto-boot again?

Also, one of my internal harddrives -- my work in progress drive! -- isn't showing up.

WTF? Help!

 

[binary visions]

Sounds like your master boot record is corrupted.

Put in your Windows XP CD. After it goes through the driver loading and presents you with the installation startup screen, choose the "Repair Console" option. It'll drop you to a command prompt. Just type "fixmbr" - it's a utility included in the repair console.

 

[LordOpie]

seriously, if you and Antimony ever come to Colorado, let me know, I owe you several meals and beers

However, I put in the "OS CD" that came with the computer. Dude, it's a Dell! The CD looks like some proprietary crap. Anywho, it locked up my system, so I rebooted, problems, boot menu, problems, boot menu, finally started back up and now all harddrives, network connections, whatever, all work again.

Strange.

I would like to fix the problem, but I'll try it at the end of the day since I'm able to function again.

Any third party programs you know of that I can download so I can avoid using the Dell 'startup' CD?

 

[binary visions]

Sure. Poke around Google for a copy of fdisk.exe - you'll need to create an MSDOS startup disk (can be done through the format menu in Windows), and copy fdisk to it.

When you start up to the command prompt, type: fdisk /mbr

Accomplishes the exact same result as the "fixmbr" program.

 

[binary visions]

I've got several meals promised to me across the US and in South America as well. Maybe one of these days I'll just spend a summer travelling and collecting them

 

[homestar]

open command line, type in

rm homestar*

...hey, it worked!

 

[Reactor]

homestar >>/dev/null

 

[LordOpie]

Last edited by binary visions : Today at 05:07 AM.

what'd he post?


And what's Homestar Runner got to do with my computer?

 

[binary visions]

He posted the command for the forced, recursive removal of everything on your hard drive

I hope he enjoyed his first four posts, they were his last.