A couple of months ago, we bought a 2 TB WD "Elements" usb external
hard drive when our previous large external was giving out.
I was able to transfer the stuff on the old drive to the new 2tb and
all seemed fine. Problems started when I needed to reinstall windows
after running into a major issue with my jaws video intercept that I
could not get fixed after wrestling with it for half a week.
I have an unattended disk with driver packs for xp and usualy
reinstalling windows is fairly easy. This time,however, the computer
kept hanging at bootup. The problem may have been that we left the
externals connected and turned on while reformatting and
reinstalling. We swapped around the drive letters and Chris corrected
the boot sequence and hard disk priority in cmos.
When this did not correct the problem, we re-reformatted
and reinstalled windows again, this time disconnecting all the
peripherals before installation and putting them back one at a time.
All went well until we reconnected this 2 tb wd external. When we
did, the computer again hung on bootup.
I researched the problem and eventually found out in some online
forum that apparently some of the cheep wd externals sold as "My
Book" and especially this really low-end "elements" model caused the
handing problem at bootup on some computers. The problem is a
conflict between the hd's firmware and the firmware on the
motherboard. updating the MOtherboard's firmware is not an option
because it is a cheapie ASRock board that did not have many firware
updates and already came with what is still the latest firmware
revision for it when we bought it several years ago.
Chris finally transplanted the hd into a new usb enclosure and this
solved the bootup problem.
However, yesterday I had trouble accessing the drive and when I ran
chkdsk /f /r
on it
it eventually told me that
"the second ntfs boot sector is unwritable:
Partition magic sees the disk as unpartitioned and unformatted. Thus
I am sure that reformatting and repartitioning the drive would fix
the problem with the boot sector. It would not,however, fix the
problem of there being nearly a TB of audio books and other goodies
on that drive that we have no other place to store on nor the funds
to buy a new hard drive at this time.
Is there any way to restore the boot sector to what it is supposed to
be without losing the data on the drive? any help and suggestions on
this would be more than welcome.
Thanks bunches
Doris
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