Posted on April 11th, 2013 by James Litten
XP Won’t Boot 🙁�� Repair Series Part 1: POST and MBR Issues
DISCLAIMER: These examples use techniques that I actually employ in the real world to deal with real problems. They might be wrong or dangerous. They might be inefficient. If you try them yourself, it might cause damage or irreparable loss. I take no responsibility for anything you do based on my examples or the information that I provide here. Turning on your computer and having it not start is one of the worst experiences computer users can have. It is often mysterious and you are given little information as to what is wrong. Usually a cryptic blue screen error, a one line error like “Operating System Missing” or nothing at all. Just a blank screen that never does anything or just keeps restarting on its own in an endless loop. Every week I fix unbootable XP computers. Even though the XP operating system has been off the market for years, it is still almost as common for me to repair as Windows 7 computers. A lot of times when I do remote repairs (by phone, email or my private discussion board) the user does not have an XP disc and this complicates things further for them. Many laptops never came with an XP disc and often the user hasn’t needed the disc for years and if they had one, they have no idea where it may be stored. Here are the errors I see most often and some tips on how to repair them. We will be looking at Windows XP 32-bit using NTFS for the filesystem. When you turn on the computer, its CPU begins to carry out the programming instructions contained in the basic input/output system (BIOS). The BIOS contains the code that starts the computer regardless of the operating system installed. The first set of startup instructions is the Power On Self Test (POST). The POST gets the computer ready for loading the operating system.- Hard disk absent
- Hard disk failed
- Hard disk missing
- Hard disk not found
- Hard disk error
- No Bootable Device Available
- No Bootable Devices Found
- Boot Device Not Found
- Error Insert proper boot device
- Reboot and select proper boot device error
Troubleshooting
Important safety tips. When disconnecting or checking the hard drive connections, always make sure the computer is unplugged and has no power (hold down the power button for a few moments to drain any stored power after unplugging). Also, you should be grounded with a wrist strap or take other precautions not to shock anything with static electricity. Check the BIOS settings Start the computer and go into the BIOS settings. There should be instructions for how to do this as soon as the computer starts. Like, “ Press F2 to enter system settings“. In the BIOS look and see if your hard drive is listed. If it is not, then we need to find out why. If it is listed then make sure that it is also listed as a boot device in the Boot Order section of the BIOS (search online for a manual that is specific to your model for the exact settings location in your BIOS). If everything looks okay in the BIOS then see if your computer has built in diagnostics. Many brand name computers like Dell, HP and Compaq do. Consult the manual for your computer for details. If it passes the diagnostics then move on to checking the MBR later in this post. If you find a problem in the BIOS then you need to check the physical connections of the hard drive. Desktop Computer Unplug the power cable and hold down the power button for a few moments to drain any stored power after unplugging. IDE Drives I have seen the ribbon cable go bad on many IDE hard drives. The easist way to check it is to replace it with a new one or one that you know is good. Check that the power MOLEX connector is plugged into the drive tightly. Check that the ribbon cable is properly seated in the Primary IDE socket on the motherboard. Check that the ribbon cable is properly seated in the socket on the hard drive. Make sure that the jumpers are set properly so that the boot drive is set as the Primary Master and anything else connected to the cable is set to Primary Slave. Or If using Cable Select, make sure the jumpers on the drive are set correctly and that the boot drive is plugged into the Master plug on the ribbon cable (the end plug on an 80 conductor cable or the middle plug on a 40 conductor cable). Check the BIOS again to see if the drive is now properly detected. SATA Drives Check that the power and data cables are properly seated in the drive and motherboard. Check the BIOS settings, particularly ones that look like these (consult your manual for the proper settings)… SATA RAID / AHCI Mode SATA Port Native Mode Onboard SATA/IDE Crtl Mode Check the BIOS again to see if the drive is now properly detected. Laptop Drives Unplug the power cable, and remove the battery first before removing the Hard Drive. Remove any thing else plugged into the laptop. Pull out the hard drive and carefully reseat it. Check the BIOS again to see if the drive is now properly detected. If you still get the error at this point, it is probably a serious problem with the drive itself. See if it is detected in a different computer. You can see some of my other blog posts on data recovery for instructions on doing this. After the POST When you start a computer from the hard drive, the BIOS identifies the startup drive and reads the master boot record (MBR). The MBR is always located at the first sector so the BIOS can find it. It contains a small program called the master boot code that the BIOS loads into memory and begins to run. The master boot code runs and performs the following activities
The partition table makes up the rest of the MBR and defines the size and type of the partitions which you usually see as drives in Windows like C: D: etc… If the first hard drive on the system does not contain an active partition, the partition table is corrupted or if the master boot code cannot locate the boot sector of the system volume from the partition table, the MBR displays messages similar to the following: Scans the partition table for the active partition. Finds the starting sector of the active partition. Loads a copy of the boot sector from the active partition into memory. Transfers control to the executable code in the boot sector.
- Invalid partition table.
- Error loading operating system.
- Missing operating system.
- No Bootable Devices Found
- Reboot and select proper boot device error
Boot your computer from the Windows XP CD (see the manual for your computer for instructions on booting from a CD) When the ‘Welcome to Setup’ screen appears, press the R button on your keyboard to start the Recovery Console. The Recovery Console will start. If you have multiple Windows installations, it will list them, and you enter the number associated with the installation you want to work on and press enter. If you have just one Windows installation, type 1 and press enter. You will then be prompted for the Administrator’s password. If there is no password, press enter. Otherwise type in the password and then press enter. You will now see a C:\Windows> prompt and you can start using the Recovery Console. fixmbr to think it worked even though it did not. I always look at the MBR partition table before running fixmbr. Gparted (described further below) makes this easy to do. If you are attempting to repair the default boot drive, you can type fixmbr and hit enter. You may see a warning like this… If you type y then it will quickly write a new MBR to the drive. Now remove the CD and type exit and hit enter to reboot the computer and see if it is fixed. If this does not fix it there may be deeper problems with the MBR or the problem may be further in the boot process. How to look at your Partitions and MBR (even if your computer doesn’t boot) If your computer sees the hard drive but still does not boot, we can take a look at the MBR using a bootdisk or bootable USB (if the computer has USB booting capabilities). Lately, I’ve preferred PartedMagic for this. It is free but be sure to donate to him if his product helps you. Follow the directions there to make a boot CD. Boot your broken computer from the CD and Select 1. Default Settings (Runs from RAM) Lets take this opportunity to look at the built-in Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) diagnostic report of the hard drive. After PartedMagic loads, double-click the Disk Health icon on the desktop and then double-click the icon for your hard drive and select the Attributes tab. I usually look for bad sectors “Reallocated Sector Count” represented by the raw value of attribute ID 5 (and C5 to a lesser extent). If this value is greater than 0 you may want to click on the Perform Tests tab and run the “Short Self Test” to make sure that it runs with a test result of “Completed without error”. If you see problems here, then the drive is probably going bad and you should focus on data recovery and replace it. Next we can use the Partition Editor program in Parted Magic called GParted to see if the partitions are showing up properly. Double click the Partition Editor icon on the desktop and select /dev/sda Make sure that one of the partitions has ‘ boot‘ in the FLAGS column. If not, choose the partition that you want to boot from and right-click it, select Manage Flags and check the box for the Boot flag. Then click the Apply button, remove the CD and reboot to see if that fixed it. If you see anything strange here like tiny hidden bootable partitions, you should consult with a professional as this could be malware. Changing the Boot flag on partitions is relatively easy to undo but deleting a partition may make things worse. If you don’t see any partitions on your hard drive listed in the Partition Editor then you can look at the hex of your MBR at the partition table and see if something looks wrong there. In PartedMagic there is a button in the lower left corner of the screen that functions much like the START button on a Windows XP desktop so I’ll refer to it here as the START button. Open LXTerminal, [b]START>ACCESSORIES>LXTerminal[/b] Type dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/sda1/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 and press enter. To view the MBR type hexedit and press enter. For a filename enter /media/sda1/mbr.bin Here is a screenshot showing the partition table data section highlighted (and the Magic number or MBR signature 55 AA or 0xaa55 which all MBRs must have). Partition Table Recovery/Repair with TestDisk For this section lets look at an MBR with a messed up partition table. This is from the same drive as the previous picture but I’ve deleted the partition. When we try to boot from this drive, we get the error… Boot device not found. Lets boot into PartedMagic again and open LXTerminal and type Testdisk Choose No Log (since we have no disk to write to) Select our drive Here it will tell you if there is an error detected for the disk. Select Intel Select Analyse Here it will often tell you errors with the partitions (like invalid sector counts) or show bizarre partitions that may be overlapping or corrupted in the partition table. Select Quick Search Say No to question about Vista It finds our bootable partition Press enter and then choose Write and confirm that you want to write the new partition table to the MBR Now reboot and the system comes back like before the partition was deleted. This also works for damaged or corrupted partition tables. More details on using TestDisk to repair partitions can be found here If you’ve gotten this far and still haven’t found the reason why your computer does not boot, then we will move on to the next step in XP’s boot process. The Bootloader to Logon. Go to for that post. ALL COMMENTS ARE MODERATED TO PREVENT SPAM 
