Windows 2000 Pro crash, can't get a boot

[dougcrane6]

Hi all,

My dilema is that over this past weekend we had a blackout at work. Lost all power. All client machines as well as servers are hooked up to UPS's. Came in on Monday and rebooted all servers and clients. They all came back up with the exception of the boss's (of course!!) Dell Precision Workstation 340 running Windows 2000 Pro. I booted the system, got the the splash page that says Windows is starting up with the scroll bar above it....and the system freezes. Ran all Dell diagnostics, even ran their 90/90 hard drive test....Everything passes fine. Ran chkdsk and it says it found and fixed errors on the drive, but still won't boot. I can't boot into safe mode, can't repair with the Emergency Repair disk that was created, was unsuccessful with the recovery console, couldn't get a repair install to work....I've spoken with Dell tech support and they think something has become corrupted on the drive... Well DUH!!!!

Anyone have any tips or suggestions before I have to break down and try to format the drive and proceed with a clean install?

 

[wolluf]

Think you've covered everything I would have tried! Can you get the data off the drive (by slaving it elsewhere)?

 

[dougcrane6]

I did a little research on the 'Net and found someone with similar problems on a Dell Optiplex. After finding out that they were able to boot in after disabling the NIC in the BIOS, I decided to give it a try.

Sure enough, I was able (thankfully) to boot into a recovery installation of 2000 Pro. I was worried about having to recover the data from the drive. Afraid that I was going to have to do a parellel install into WINNT2 so I could recover the files and folders. System recovered ok, and I re enabled the NIC in the BIOS... Now I'm back to the orginal problem again.... Grrr..... Going to try reinstalling the Dell Intel motherboard drivers. If that doesn't work I plan on removing and reinstalling TCPIP.

Keep ya posted....