OS unable to boot, pls help!

iamroot

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I have a weird problem with my computer which is that while the hard drive is detected fine in the BIOS, when I try to boot the OS, I get an error saying "Invalid disk" and I'm asked to replace the disk. I thought that my HDD had all its data wiped out by accident, so I used a live cd and discovered that all my data is still intact.

I have been having some problems with the system before, such as "Low Virtual Memory" errors in Windows and "Drive Access Errors" in Fedora. I switched to another SATA socket and the problems went away for about 2 weeks until yesterday when they all came back.

Can someone confirm for me if this means that my HDD is faulty or is it another component? I don't feel like lugging my entire system down to the shop so hopefully I can isolate the problem to a single component.
 
Sounds like the hard drive is possibly going bad, more likely, around the first part of the hard drive, where the MBR is located. If you're computer doesn't see that MBR, it will do things like that. And the fact you have had issues with drive access with a live CD makes me think the hard drive is going bad for sure. I would run a diagnostic read/write test on that drive (non-distructive, of course) ASAP.
 
I would like to do that. However, the diagnostic programs provided by Maxtor do not work as my drive is SATA and I'm using the nForce4 chipset.
 
Sounds like the drive is bad to me. My old hard drive would give me a "low virtual memory" message when I only had like 33 proccesses running and I have 1.5GB RAM. I thought it was odd but then again, that hard drive wasn't the greatest. Your hard drive does seem to be going bad in my opinion. If you have an older, decent one you could try using that with FC5 and save up for a new one for windows and then just use two drives instead of a dual boot...
 
I installed the NT Bootloader from the Windows XP cd and Win XP managed to boot. Everything worked fine until I tried to boot again a few hours later, then the same problem emerged.
 
most likely software, but if it crashes randomly like that, it can lead to bad sectors at the MBR part. That, will make it hardware.

So, hardware problem is more evident than software. Return drive.
 
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