bootup stops at black screen -- hard disk or mobo driver problem?

[GrandSpleen]

First order of business, the specs:

Video card: Geforce 5700 ultra fx
Proc: Athlon AMD 2100+
Hard drives: primary Maxtor 80gb; slave Maxtor 60gb
motherboard: Nforce 2 Epox 8RDA3+
512Mb DDR RAM
WinXP Pro

Ok. A few days ago I was having problems with a game, and I read that updating your motherboard drivers would fix this. I went and found the appropriate drivers and updated. I chose to install the optional component (I don't know if this is the problem or not... just providing information here -- I believe this had something to do with ATA?). This fixed the problem with my game, but the next day I started to notice problems with the computer. I don't know if the motherboard drivers were the problem, but... anyway, first I noticed that the slave hard drive stopped showing up under Windows. In BIOS, the secondary IDE connection had been set to None. I thought this might have something to do with installing new mobo drivers... but I found that I couldn't get the BIOS to automatically detect the hard drive anymore. I fiddled with it for a few minutes and it finally automatically detected (Don't know why it finally worked). Everything was fine in Windows after I booted back up. Later the computer developed additional symptoms: it wouldn't make it through bootup; instead of loading the Windows splashscreen, the screen would just go black and hang there indefinitely. Once, it did load the splash screen but it just hung there. Sometimes the computer would successfully boot up. Eventually, I stopped having any sort of success, and the black screen would be as far as I could get. That is the system's current condition.

The last line I see before the screen goes black is "Verifying hard disk data." I tried to boot up in safe mode but instead of giving me options after I hit f8, the screen just goes black. I tried booting up from CD, but I get "Setup is examining your hardware configuration" and then the black screen. If I unplug the hard disk the Windows setup will run from CD, but obviously I can't get any further with no hard disk attached. BIOS recognizes the 80gb primary hard drive, but I can no longer get BIOS to even recognize that anything is connected as a slave drive.

Presently, I'm running an older system, running Win98 on an intel P3 550. I have the problematic hard drive attached as a slave, and it reads in BIOS, but won't show up in Windows (a friend suggested to me that this is a result of different file formats). This is about as far as I've gotten.

Assuming I can get this hard drive to read someplace, do I need to format? Will that even help? Is the drive (or, are the drives) damaged? Are the mobo's IDE ports damaged? Is this a result of the mobo driver updates? So many questions... this is beyond my skill level. I appreciate any help anyone can give me.
Thanks a bunch,
GrandSpleen

 

[johnjkr1]

Ok, to clear up some things:

The additional component of the drivers you are thinking about is the newer nvidia nforce IDE SW drivers. They are for your ATA drives. This newer driver can cause problems with some systems, although it is rare. Also, these drivers CAN NOT change anything in the bios. They do not affect anything on the bios level.

Now, you may simply have a bad hard drive. I would suggest that, if the drive is seen by either computer in the bios, you should run the diagnostic on it from the drive maker. Make the boot floppy, if it tests out ok, then you can rule it out.

The reason you can't see your XP hard drive on your 98 machine is that 98 can not read NTFS. Almost all XP machines use NTFS.

So, how to fix it. Well, if your drives test fine, then you need to put them back into your original machine and try a repair install of xp. Many times that will solve your problem. If it does not, you can try booting into safe mode and either removing the new nforce drivers or doing a system restore to a previous point. And if all that fails, format.

 

[GrandSpleen]

Thanks for your reply, John. As of this update, the problem has been solved. I was unable to boot into safe mode or even initiate a repair using CD (attempts at both procedures yielded the same black screen). I swapped the 60gb hard drive to master and disconnected the 80gb (and incidentally, the 60gb is, for most of the year, the primary hard drive for another XP system with similar hardware -- same model of mobo, even). The system booted up. Having seen this, I shut the computer off and reattached the ailing 80gb drive. Before Windows booted up, CheckDisk ran and apparently corrected a boatload of errors on the 80gb drive. After this I swapped them back to 80gb being master and 60gb slave. That was several hours ago, and everything seems fine now. Hopefully none of the symptons will reoccur.

So, having been solved this problem, I wish I knew what caused it. I suppose it's possible that my system is one of the rare cases where this driver caused a problem. I hadn't changed anything else about the system in at least a week -- updated graphics drivers then... and before that, probably nothing for four months at least. So if it wasn't something about the mobo drivers, I'm stumped. And if it was the new drivers, I'm not sure I understand why CheckDisk was able to correct the problem without further side effects.

Well.... we'll see, as for further side effects. For now, though, I'm ok.

Thanks for your help!
GS