My dell comp. gave me a fatal error message and then said "No Boot Secotr on internal hard drive"? Ideas?

Question

My dell comp. gave me a fatal error message and then said "No Boot Secotr on internal hard drive"? Ideas?

Answer 1

This sounds like your "Boot Sector or the Boot ini file is either missing or has gone corrupt, or your system can't see the hard drive. There could be a couple of reasons for this.



First, the cable that connects the hard drive may be loose or corroded, so the first thing you want to try is to unplug and then reconnect both the data and the power cables.



Second, if the above has no effect, then you should try running the "Windows Repair Console". This requires that you have a Windows XP installation disk. Because this is a Dell, it may have come with a Restore disk set and not a "real" copy of Windows. Not to worry, you can borrow a coyp for this operation, and it will be legal in that you are not installing Windows, just repairing it. Ok, here is what you do.



USING THE WINDOWS REPAIR CONSOLE



Put your XP disk into your CD drive and restart your system. This will start the XP installation process. When you come to the screen that asks if you want to install XP or if you would like to “Repair” XP, choose Repair. This will open the repair console command prompt. At the prompt, type: chkdsk /r. (There is a space between the k and the /. Now hit “Enter”. The repair should now start. Allow it to run until it stops. This can take some time, so be patient.



If all goes well, XP will replace or repair any and all missing operating system files.



Note: Before attempting the above, you must first enter the BIOS to make sure that the boot sequence is set so that the CD drive boots before the hard drive.

Answer 2

Hi,



I would suspect that the boot sector of the hard drive has become corrupted thereby the computer can't find the operating system.



You can try this :-



Boot from the XP / 2000 CDROM and allow the setup to begin. Once the beginning files are copied, you will be asked to Install Windows or use the Recovery Console. Please choose "r" here, to run the recovery console.



You will now type in the following commands when the prompt appears:



chkdsk /f

* This will repair any obvious file system damage, which could complicate things.



diskpart

* This will run the XP disk partition utility. We will be checking to see if your partition looks OK. If you see your partition, and the information diskpart provides appears correct, then that's a good thing. :)



Press [ESC] to exit Diskpart, when everything looks peachy.



fixboot

* We'll write a new boot sector, so the computer knows how to boot the computer



fixmbr

* We'll write a new boot record, so the computer knows how to boot Windows



You should be taken care of. If it still does not work, you may need to delete your partition(s) using diskpart, then recreate the partition(s) (using diskpart, again).



That may recover the windows or it might mean a complete hard drive format and a re-install of windows.



Arnak

Answer 3

"No boot sector" means that the computer is unable to find the information it needs on the hard drive to start Windows. This may be a virus, a corrupted file, or mean the death of your hard drive.



If you have an original Windows CD, put in in the CD drive and reboot the computer. It should start the Windows Install and offer to let you "repair" Windows. A repair will put back on the drive the files needed to boot Windows without remove any of your data or other programs.

Answer 4

That really doesn't sound good at all. I think you might have to re-format, and lose everything you had on that computer. Either that or you could take it in somewhere and they could get some stuff off of your hard drive, then re-format it for you. But if you don't need anything on your hard drive, just put in the windows XP disk and restart your computer, it should say something like "Press any key to boot from disk", then just push a key. Then you should be able to follow the on screen prompts pretty easily they're pretty easy to understand.

Answer 5

simply put , you have been hit wit a virus....it wiped out the boot sector on the drive, you will need to reinstalll windows to respore the system...

Answer 6

Is it a labtop? I had the same thing. I dropped mine and my removable hardrive came loose. Mine is on the side and all i had to do was push it back in until it clicked. I would bet that your harddrive just came loose too. Good luck!