Recovery From Power Cut-off

[calpoly04]

My T-60 experienced a power cut off while it was running. Unfortunately, battery was not attached at that moment. Then I tried to restart the machine x times, but all got stuck at the windows loading screen where the little thing in the bar kept going over and over. Tried to log into safe mode, no good, stuck after loading the file Mup.sys, according to the screen. Then tried using the "thinkvatange" button to recover, it showed a blue screen saying some general instructions about removing newly installed hardwares and ended up giving the physical address of isator.sys file, no further recovery operations could be proceeded. Any advice that can get it booted into the OS? This seems more like a hard drive damage to me. Should I just call and get a hard drive change?

[kulivontot]

try finding a windows xp cd and booting into recovery console. Then run chkdsk, that might take care of it. If it can't find you're drive, make sure you enable SATA compatibility mode. If that doesn't work, download some hard drive diagnostic software and burn it to a cd, and boot into that to check for bad sectors. I think there might be a utility inside the bios that can do that. My guess is that it's probably just some damaged files that chkdsk can fix. If not, and there is actual hardware damage, you'll have to get it replaced under warranty.

[calpoly04]

Thanks, man. After turing on the SATA compatibility mode, I was able to check the disk. Then it took care of it. Now it is back and working. Why is it criticle to have the compatibility mode switched?

[Hamid]

Since XP's Install CD doesn't have the AHCI driver you have to switch to compatibility mode to make the drive accessible in recovery console.

HTH,
Hamid

[ramian]

Any chance of getting an AHCI driver integrated with the windows CD using something like nLite or RVM?