I am working on a Dell XPS 400 for a friend of mine. The computer just started hanging at the loading XP screen. When I try Safe Mode, it hangs at the Mup.sys file. I ran Dell's built-in diagnostic utility at bootup and it gave an error on the hard drive that "Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected." I am assuming that I have some bad sectors on the HD.
I have already run Knoppix which allowed me to access the HD no problem and recover the essential files for my friend, but I really don't want to do a clean install unless I absolutely have to. I would rather run some more utitlies on it first (fixmbr, fixboot, chkdsk, etc.)....HOWEVER, I cannot for the life of me find a way to get to any sort of Recovery Console. I tried Ctrl+F11 which only offered a full system restore back to it's factory state, I also tried F12 to get into the boot menu which has some of Dell's Utilities, but no Recovery Console. And I tried booting from a regular Windows XP CD, but it claimed that it could not find any hard disks....is this because it's a SATA hard drive?? PLEASE HELP
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I actually went ahead and selected Combination mode and tried it, and it worked...it's running the chkdsk now. Thank you guys for your help...Ive been pulling my hair out for a few hours now just trying to find a way to get into Recovery Console, and it was right there in front of my face the whole time.
Hopefully this fixes my boot problem.
also try (for better hard drive performance, ie: faster) using the program nLite to slip stream the raid driver that your installation is missing. The reason the other users are telling you to switch to SATA native mode is because it allows SATA drives to masqurade as IDE drives. While this will allow you to install Windows XP, it slows down the performance of your hard drive and only allows you to have the limited four IDE drives attached to your computer. For me that would be a terrible setup, because I have two hard drives and two IDE cdrom drives. If I add another SATA drive, either cdrom or hard drive, I need to remove one device. whew! That said, if you have less than four IDE and SATA drives and you don't plan to add any more in the future, you're fine. But, if you want to add more drives you'll need to hunt down your AHCI SATA driver from dell and use a floppy during the installation, or slipstream it into your windows disc.
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by: and235100Posted on 2008-02-21 at 11:14:30ID: 20950840
You might need to make a change in your computer's bios to use SATA Native mode - so Recovery Console can pick up the hard disk.
Otherwise - as per here: http://www.experts-exchang
Slipstream the drivers into an nLite CD - and access your disk through Recovery Console as normal.