[NTLUG:Discuss] Not necessarily a Linux question

[Mark Bickel]

> From discuss-admin at ntlug.org Sun Apr  8 10:30 CDT 2001
> From: Dennis Myhand <1dmm9671 at unixstew.tstc.edu>
> To: discuss at ntlug.org,> Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Not necessarily a Linux question
> List-Archive: <http://www.ntlug.org/pipermail/discuss/>
> Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 10:33:31 -0500

> I have a hardware question which really has little or nothing to do with
> Linux, but I can't find an answer elsewhere.
> 
> I have received a 20 gig Western Digital Harddrive formatted NTFS which,
> when I set it up in a machine, is detected by the bios, but when it
> comes time to boot, gives the error:
> "Stage1 Hard Drive Failure"
> 
> My question is, is this fixable, or is it really, really bad.  As an
> aside to Linux, I have recompiled the 2.4.2 kernel to read NTFS and I
> can mount the harddrive and read it just fine.  It simply will not boot.

You didn't say what type (SCSI,AT,AT-DMA) or what position (/dev/?d?).
Also, what type of BIOS? Are you trying to do a dual boot? If so what boot
loader are you using? Also what M$ OS are you trying to boot - NT4.0? Win2K?
Details ... always useful when asking for help.

Are you sure the message wasn't: "Stage 1: Hard Disk Error"? If so I would
guess that you are using the GRUB booter and you might find some clues by
reading the GRUB documentation. There's a Linux + NT-Loader-mini-HOWTO you 
might want to check out too. Both can be found a http://www.linuxdoc.org

There are many ways to make a dual-boot setup work, but typically NT wants
to be loaded using it's own boot loader. There are other ways, but beware
if you reinstall NT it may rewrite the MBR and NT boot loader and you will
then have to make changes to access Linux again.

Given that you can mount and read the NTFS partition under Linux, I doubt
that there is anything physically wrong with the drive. It seems more likely
that this is a boot loader configuration issue.

HTH,
Mark.Bickel at ericsson.com