First post, by Snover
- Rank
- l33t++
Yay. Go Creative drivers. My SBAudigy has managed to do it again. This one is in STORY-O-VISION.
I was in the middle of installing Unreal [see: WRITE OPERATION], watching some television and using the Audigy's built-in AC-3 decoder chip for the tele sound. Suddenly I get a friendly familiar clicking in the audio and my computer locks up. "No problem," I think, "stupid Audigy drivers. When I restart my computer, if it gives me an invalid boot device error, I'll just run CHKDSK from the W2K CD and be back on my way like I did before." So hard reset, Windows 2000 logo comes up, load goes half-way, then I get the happy BSOD with the error INVALID_BOOT_DEVICE (or similar). "Oh, well," I think. Grab my W2K CD, plop it in, change my CMOS settings to boot from CD first, insert my RAID driver floppy disk, configure the W2K installer to use said driver (like I usually do/have done), wait ten minutes for the stupid thing to start up, hit "R", and as I see the display bar show the partition in question -- what the fuck? BSOD error in NTFS.SYS?!! What the hell is this all about? I restart, try booting normally, no luck. Go back into setup, hit "R" again, same error. "Well, fuck," I think to myself. So I pull out my DriveCopy Pro 4.0 CD and plunk it in. Loading DR-DOS...
DR-DOS loaded.
So I've got some utilities from the CD on drive Y:. NTFSINI.EXE, this looks promising. Whoops, no properties. NTFSINI.EXE 0 C:, "'C:' Unrecognised command."
Damn. So just NTFSINI.EXE 0.
Help message displays.
Dammit.
So I run a utility that checks all the partitions on all the devices attached to the computer. "*:BIN ... NTFS ... 117xxxMB" -- so, okay, here's my partition, but what the hell's with the wildcard?
Oh, well.
NTFSINI.EXE *
"'*' Unrecognised command."
Shit. Shit shit shit damn damn damn fuck fuck fuck.
FDISK.COM. Rebuild master boot record?
"THIS WILL REPLACE BOOT RECORD TO START DR-DOS."
err, no. Don't want to do that.
So, I can't get my drive mounted using DR-DOS, and it's an invalid boot device, despite being able to load up at least 50% of Windows' pre-GUI stuff including the boot record and the Windows logo, leading me to think that the drives haven't malfunctioned...yet. (Trust me, after this, I'm getting some new !@#$ drives.)
Tried a few other things, too... disconnected my D: drive, tampered with the RAID settings, found a utility to read raw partitions... it read the CD drives instead of the actual partition 0, which was my NTFS drive. Interesting since all these utils were NTFS-enabled. Safe mode, Debug mode, nada.
Any other last-ditch efforts anyone can think of to salvage my shit? I've got 50MB of email dating back to 1997 that I really don't want to lose. It has registration codes, other stuff. I backed up my devel code three days ago, so that's not a problem, but aside from losing all the stuff in my email, I'd also lose all the settings that I have spent weeks perfecting.
So, uh, Nicht? Stiletto? uh, DosFreak? 😉 GoldFinger? Vlad? Somebody? Anybody? Please? Help? Me?
The only way I'm able to get this message to you is because we have a second computer in the house on a whopping 33600 baud connection. So, anyway, yeah. I'll check back at school tomorrow in the afternoon(ish). Pleeease! This computer also has a CD burner so anything that you think could fix the problem I would greatly appreciate. No emails, though. Only direct links. (heh, wrong computer to be trying to get emails on. 😒)
Thanks, guys, for any help you can get to me.
I really don't need to restore these drives to runnable condition, I just need to be able to extract that email data file (and hell, my daily system backup file while I'm at it) to my storage drive. (And my storage drive -- FAT32, thank god -- needs to mount as well, heh.)
So, yeah. HEEELP!!
Also, if you need the, err, specific error
Yes, it’s my fault.