So, Ive been through hell and back trying to repair my windows boot sector
after a failed attempt to dual boot with linux.
the problem: I am currently installing a FRESH (read: completely
reformatted drive) version of windows parallel to my old one. it is on a
second SCSI drive (scsi id 1), and I am doing this to avoid destroying some
critical data on the first corrupt drive/version of windows.
I have gone through all the steps up to and including reformatting the new
drive, installing the master boot record on the new partition, and rebooting
the machine. unpon reboot, setup loads once again, and is in the "loading
devices" stage, with the green bar at roughly 70% and the message
"approximately 34 minutes left," when the entire system fails, and gives a
three-line bluescreen saying
**hardware malfunction**
please contact your hardware manufacturer
your system has halted.
I can manually reset and reboot, and it continues as such.
prior to this, I had a corrupt boot sector on the first drive (SCSI id 0)
which i attempted to repair using the windows boot disk. this repair failed,
so I have tried to reinstall a parallel copy of windows for the purpose of
simply accessing the old disk and recovering data as a last-ditch effort.
however, I am being thwarted at every attempt.
my system stats are as such:
Tyan Thunder K8W motherboard, 2x AMD Opteron 250
2GB dualchannel ecc registered ram (1 GB per processor, dedicated)
Adapted Ultra160 SCSI controller (not RAID)
2x 30Gb scsi drives, toshiba, exact model can be found, btu not on me right
now.
any suggestions? I know that both disks have boot sectors now, and I have
tried various things, such as booting from the disk, booing from both drives,
it always goes to the windows setup screen regardless, and then hangs in the
loading devices step.