Fatal error with hp laptop

[fastnet]

Greetings. I am having a really hard time with a laptop it's a hp nx6120. Intel Centrino 1.6 Ghz, with 512 MB RAM.

It have debian sarge and windows xp professional. When I try to enter to windows at grub, it reloads the grub again and the x-windows doesn't start at debian. At debian I run df and it doesn't recognize the windows partition (hda1). So I run cfdisk and it sees the ntfs partition and the ntfs partition have a boot flag (wtf?) and the linux partition doesn't have one, so i put the boot flag to the ext3 and eliminate the ntfs one, but when I try to write it gives me an error saying it can't do the operatioin. I also tried to mount the hda1 partition and it tells me the primary boot sector is invalid.

I don't know what to do. Is it the drive? the partition?

And what tool can I use to recover information?. I am downloading knoppix right now for recovery.

Thanks in advanced.

[SirDice]

mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/hda1 /mnt?

It does sound like grub hasn't been setup properly.

[IKnowNot]

We take it this is a fresh install of Debian and you have not been able to log into XP since the install?

I agree with SirDice

How about posting the contents of grub.conf, maybe that will help.

I am curious: during the Debian install, where did you install Grub? ( did you choose defaults ? )

And maybe adding information on the hard drives and partitions may help as well.

[fastnet]

The laptop had months working with both Debian and WinXP perfectly.

Update

I run the WinXP CD and entered in the Recovry Console.

Run chkdsk: it said it have problems that can't be fixed.

Run bootcfg: didn't run saying there was problems

Try to copy netldtect (or something like that, the files that call boot.ini) couldn't copy.

Dir: couldn't list directories.

Reboot, Run WinXP cd again, try to recover installation but the CD didn't recognize that partition as winXP, in fact in didn't recognize the partition as ntfs, it was "unknown".

[nihil]

If this has suddenly started without you messing with anything I would go to the HDD manufacturer's website and get their diagnostic tool and run it.

I would backup whatever important stuff you can whilst you still can.

[brokencrow]

Try booting to a live cd (linux). If you can, attach a USB external
HDD of some kind and pull your data off that baby. Chkdsk has
always been a very reliable indicator for me as to the health of
an HDD. Linux tends to be a tad more forgiving of hardware errors.
Sounds like it's too late for Ghost. You got some work in front of
you.

[nihil]

Yes, I would second what brokencrow is proposing.

1. Recover personal data.
2. Run disk diagnostics..........thinking on that, HP tend to get "badged" HDDs from weird sources, so you probably cannot get a manufacturer's diagnostic. There should have been some from HP that shipped with the machine?

If the HDD checks out, then try reformatting, repartitioning, and starting afresh.

Incidentally, did chkdsk give you any specific error messages?

[SirDice]

Incidentally, did chkdsk give you any specific error messages?

Yeah, I was wondering about that too..

What switches did you use? Try chkdsk c: /f /r.