Help! major problem on start up!

[andreadebiase]

hi all,
yesterday i installed a second hard drive on my pc to see if there was any problem on it as I was told from i friend. The installation was ok, I set it up as a slave and adjusted the jumpers on both hard drives. The bios recognized the new hard drive with no problem but Win XP pro could not boot. So I thought....ok I`ll put everything back as before and I removed the new "bad" hard drive that probably caused Win to fail booting. I set the jumper of the single hard rive as originally was and started the pc. Well I can`t boot anymore.
The posting it`s ok! the bios sees my hard drive but when the pc is about to load WinXP stops and displays:

"Win could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
System\Drivers\Ntfs.sys
You can repair by starting win-setup using the original set up cd-rom
select "r" at the first screen to start repair"

So I inserted the cd-rom and changed the boot sequence in the bios so that the cd-rom would be the booting device. So now, I can start booting from the cd-rom and win xp installation blue screen starts but it stops and doesn`t go ahead, i`m never asked wether I want to press an "r" to fix anything. The only option is to use the winXP rescue disk that I DON`T HAVE. Am I doing something wrong? when is that I am supposed to press the "r" to fix the problems? it is not very clear to me.
Do I have to format everything?
thank you

[mjc]

What was the problem with the friend's drive?

What you are describing sounds suspiciously like a boot sector virus........

[andreadebiase]

friends drive one day stopped working! i don`t know what was the sympton but seems hardware. dignostic tool of Western Digital says to contact the company so i removed it but it has affected mine. How can i scan a hard drive without enteringWindows?

[mjc]

What filesystem are you using (NTFS or FAt32)?

If FAT32, one of the free DOS scanners from the link in my sig should do it, but for NTFS you will need a rescue disk from a recent version of an XP compatible AV product....

Also before you do that make sure the drive is asctually being correctly detected in the BIOS... an error in the config there can look like a bootsector virus...the result is the same, except when you take take of the config problem you can usually boot with no problems. Repairing the boot virus can be very hard, especially in a multi-boot machine, sometimes even on a single boot machine they are hard to remove without reformatting.

[andreadebiase]

A SDRAM module got dislodged from the socket and was corrupting everything!!! thanks anyway

[mjc]

That would do it too.....:D

At least it wasn't something really bad.....