SCSI disk won't boot

[gdsully]

I have an older Compaq Deskpro workstation that will no longer boot in WinNT Workstation.

I wanted to make an image of the SCSI hard drive, but was roadblocked by non-bootable floppy and cdrom. So I removed the HD and hung it in another box - a server. I unplugged the scsi cable from scsi backplane of the server and landed it directly on the HD and booted the server. The drive was not recognized, so I aborted and returned the drive to its original machine. From this point on, the drive hasn't booted. The drive is recognized during post, but stops with a blinking cursur in upper left corner of the screen. No error messages of any kind.

I put a different scsi drive in this Deskpro and it boots, so I believe PC and controller are relatively OK. I now have this problem drive in another Deskpro workstation to run diagnostics. The drive's data is accessible. The C partition is marked as active.

What is the problem?

jerry

Edited July 14, 2006 by gdsully

[allen2]

You could try to repair the MBR, if the drive is not damaged. But if you can't boot at all, there is not a simple solution.

You can either make the old Deskpro boot from CD by replacing the CD drive if it's damaged or try to remove the scsi drive and the scsi controler and plug it to another computer and then try to repair it from there. The first solution is the most sure.

[gdsully]

I don't think there is actually anything wrong with the floppy or cdrom in the original computer. They both worked fine once the original computer had booted successfully into NT. The complication is that on the original computer, I cannot boot into the BIOS... I cannot get into the settings to check/modify the boot order... Computer prompts me to press f10 to enter bios, and appears to be headed in that direction (text "setup" appears in lower right corner after pressing f10 at post), but never enters bios. It continues thru scsi detect and hangs after finding scsi HD and tape. Cursor blinking in upper left is the end point.

Jerry

[allen2]

If i remember well, i had to deal with this problem whis compaq bios that where installed on hard drive and removed by our compagny hd mastering. I needed to reinstall the bios from a floppy disk after resseting it. After this i repartitionned the hard drive to let 16 or 32MB of free space at the begining of the hard drive. This way i was able to reinstall the bios on hard drive and then i made i an image the bios partition so i could restore it even from a non booting computer. Now you need either a same kind of computer or a scsi hard drive to try the same kind of thing.