No Operating System / Disk Geometry Error(s)

Question

My Dimension has two 20GB SCSI drives, neither of which have been partitioned.  The primary (c-drive) is used for OS and application installs.  The secondary (d-drive) is used for data.   I booted my PC from the Dell Resource CD that came with the system and ran all diagnostics individually.  Everything passed okay, but I aborted part way through the final disk write test (for secondary drive) - all tests on primary drive passed.   Having changed the BIOS to boot from the hard drive once again, I got the message 'No operating system found' when the system was restarted.  I tried rebooting from a Win2K Emergency Repair disks but same problem.  Also, the Dell Resource CD no longer boots into the diagnostic program and simply returns 'No operating system found' as well.   I managed to load Norton Ghost's Recovery Environment, which allows has some basic utilities.  From this I ran Norton Antivirus - no viruses found.  Norton Disk doctor ran okay with no errors.  But when I ran a utility to get Partition Information, it returned 'Geometry Errors' on the primary drive (see detail below).  Note that some of these utilities allows log files to be saved, so I know that the sub-directories and system folders of the primary and secondary drives all seem to exist.   The problem appears to be with the Master Boot Record.   HELP!  Does anyone know how to recover from this?  I do have a six month old Ghost of the primary drive but I only want to use this as a last resort.  If possible, I'd rather know what has gone wrong and how to fix it.     -------PARTITION INFO---------3 Disk Geometry error(s) were detected on this drive:Error#105: Partition didn't begin on head boundryunBeginHead expected to be 0 or 1, not 3Error#106: Partition didn't begin on head boundryunBeginSector expected to be 1, not 13Error#105: Partition didn't end on cylinder boundryunEndHead expected to be 3, not 0

scottatah · Answer

assuming you're on XP....this shoudl work.  Now i believe you may have said you can't boot from cd, but that doesn't make sense as it shouldn't have anything to do with the MBR.  If you're able to get into the recovery console on the xp cd, you can try a 'fixboot C:' or 'fixmbr' with more info on both below   http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixboot.mspx   http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

PD.2005 · Answer

Many thanks, scottatah.

I'm actually on Win2K, but I had a poke around Symantec's Knowledge base for info relating to drive geometry issues and found an article that mentioned that drive geometry settings were configured in the BIOS.

This helped as I didn't realise this. Comparing drive settings for my two drives I noticed that my primary drive settings were set to an unusual fixed setup, but my secondary drive was on AUTO. I simply set the primary drive to AUTO and all is now well - thank goodness.

Not sure how the BIOS got changed in the first place - most likely my fat figures!

PD.

Storage, Drives & Media

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