Hardware/Windows question

[Fairlight]

In the relative spacial/temporal region of
Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 03:10:24PM -0400, gliderman.one at verizon.net achieved the spontaneous
generation of the following:
> 
> On boot up, my XP laptop two days ago, started displaying a message  
> "Can not find operating system".
> 
> If I turn off and try again, on the second to fourth try, windows is 
> found on the hard drive and boots up, seemingly fine, and filePro and 
> other stuff seem to run fine.
> 
> Any idea of what this indicates and what the solution might be? 

Your HD is probably dying, Charles.  That message is indicative of the MBR
(Master Boot Record, which tells the system how to boot, be it a *nix
kernel, Windows, a multi-os boot loader, etc.) is not being read, or is
corrupted somehow.

Seeing as you get it to eventually boot correctly, I'd surmise that it's
hitting sporadic read errors on the drive.  Could be the heads, could be
that spot on the disk, could be another part.  Probably it's that section
of disk, if it acts fine once it's up.  But it definitely sounds like
imminent hardware failure.  An MBR is either correct or isn't.  I've never
heard of one just sporadically failing once in a while.   Honestly sounds
like bad sectors.

I am unsure if you can even get the MBR relocated with a bad sector
mapping.  Generally by the time a drive does something like this to me,
it's swapped outta there for a reliable one.

It's possible to try rewriting the MBR, but I'd advise against it.  If it's
really that section of disk that's bad, if it fails it will not boot again,
period.  Best off backing up what you can and replacing the drive.

mark->
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