Cannot boot from new hard drive

[Therma lobsterdore]

I recently purchased a 500gb Seagate barracuda hard drive (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?QuickLinx=3W4M), I can format the drive and use it as normal, but as soon as I try to boot from the drive it fails, I get a bunch of weird characters on the screen when I try to boot from it and if I press any button at this point my machine simply restarts itself. This happens if the drive is empty, or if I have installed windows xp on it.

I've tried repartitioning and re-formatting using the windows management tools but this doesn't make a difference, the problem still remains, I've also tried using the windows fixmbr utility to no avail.

I downloaded Seagate's diagnostic tools for windows, but when I try to run the utility I get an error message (some kind of .net exception, I have the latest version of the .net framework installed), it gives me the option to ignore the error, if I do then the utility loads but my hard drive isn't listed and the button to scan for drives is greyed out. I tried the dos version too and it just hangs on boot and doesn't do anything.

I really can't figure this problem out, any ideas as to what could be wrong? Like I said, I can access the drive normally without a problem, it's just when I boot from it that things go wrong.

My specs are:

AMD athlon 64 3200+
1gb unbranded memory
Asus A8n-sli motherboard
Radeon X850 XT
Creative audigy 2
windows XP 64 pro

 

[olmer]

Do you have/using another sata hdd?

In you bios is AHCI on? Did you change it from ide before/after installing os?

Do you use nForce or Silicon Image controller (try switching)? Drivers are up-to-date?

 

[Therma lobsterdore]

Yes I have two 250gb sata drives in a raid array, these work fine and I can boot from them without problem.

There is no option to turn off AHCI in my bios and the new drive is recognised by the bios and by windows without a problem, it's literally when I try to boot from the drive that things go bizarre-o.

I'm not sure what you mean about switching between nForce and silicon image sata controller's though, the board simply has four sata slots and I've tried the drive in each.

I've now tried using the various file system utilities off the ultimate boot cd and that hasn't helped, I could return the drive I guess but surely not being able to boot from a drive is a software fault as opposed to a hardware fault? If a drive can be read from, and accessed normally that means that the problem must lie elsewhere right?

 

[DrGreen2007]

"I've tried repartitioning and re-formatting using the windows management tools but this doesn't make a difference"
- if your trying to boot from the drive, why not partition it when you boot off the CD to install windows?

"Yes I have two 250gb sata drives in a raid array, these work fine and I can boot from them without problem"
- you did disable the raid setup in the motherboard when you put the 500gb drive onto one of these 2 Sata ports, right. And when you tried one of the other 2 sata ports, you changed the boot order in the bios to boot from those ports before the raid ones, right?

 

[Therma lobsterdore]

I've tried formatting and partitioning the drive using windows xp itself and during the installation of xp, I've also tried some of the dos based utilities from the ultimate boot cd, and this includes Seagate's own hard drive utilities. Yes I did indeed disable raid and set the right boot order in the bios, if I hadn't then the drive wouldn't have been detected.

I think (as per olmer's suggestion) that I might need to update the sata drivers that I'm using during the windows install, since it's a sata 2 drive and the sata driver disk I'm using is a year or so old. I'm gonna give that a shot tonight, the thing is that if it is the sata driver, would this result in the 'non system disk error' that I'm getting? I would have thought that a more meaningful error message would be displayed!

 

[mechBgon]

If you've got the SATA drive on the A8N-SLI's native SATA controller jacks, no driver disk is needed unless you have the SATA controller in RAID mode for some reason. mech's SATA ramblings. If you're not using the array anymore, switch to non-RAID mode.

 

[Therma lobsterdore]

Ok well in that case I'm back to square one as I have been using the drive in non-raid mode, ah heck! I'm pretty much out of ideas on this then, anybody else got any ideas as to what else I can try? I might just return the drive if I can't fix the problem soon.

 

[Therma lobsterdore]

Ok I solved the problem, what I had to do is put the drive into it's own raid array and now it works fine. I'd imagine that I had to do this because my original raid array was set to be bootable, and even though my raid controller was disabled it might have been confusing things somewhat, well thats the only explanation I can think of anywho's. Thanks for all the help