XP NOT STARTING - SYSTEM FILE CORRUPT

[auriga1000]

Hi all

Here's the deal. I cloned my old seagate 160g to an samsung 250g about a day and a half ago using discwizard. Cloning went through fine and was able to boot up instantly into new HDD. This morning, on startup, I get error as in title.
Fortunately, my old HDD was attached as slave so I just changed boot order and back into windows I am. Now is there a way to repair the system file on the now slave drive or do you guys think the drive itself is faulty? The top plate on the sammy was a bit pressed in on delivery which i did report to supplier. They suggested I try out the drive to check if it was damaged at all. No noises from drive and it worked fine for a day and a half.

I followed windows suggestions and stuck in my xp cd to get to recovery console but at that screen , windows tells me I have no HDD's in my system!

Any ideas?


edit: new HDD started making loud clicking noises. probably stuffed.

 

[bubbatentoe]

If Windows reported a working disk then:

disconnect the working hard drive (leave the problem one connected)
stick in a Windows XP CD & boot from it.
select recovery console (press R)
select the installation to repair (probably c:\windows)
do your admin password
type "fixmbr"
reboot & remove CD

but seeing as Windows setup doesn't detect a disk... well your disk is probably shot.