Hard drive driver lost - hoses boot?

[Mac29]

So I use a hard drive tray and it's slick. Had problem a year ago installing XP on a drive. Turned out Gparted partitions were goofing the XP install half way through. But curiously, during that problem when booting my 7 hard drive, it couldn't find the OS. No bios, black screen. Corrected itself a day later. Controller is set to ahci, it and all three of my OS drives have been fine.

So, thursday 7 64b, XP Pro SP3 drives pass post but then black screen and 'drive error.' Tried 7 drive internally on other sata cables. Same. Tried switching out sata cables to back of drive tray. Same. Power and Bios seem aok, just stops and 'drive error'.

Booted off a Linux Mint CD and used usb to view Windows drives. First, XP: LM error 'unable to mount C of XP, Dbus error org.gtk.Private.RemoveVolumeMonitor.Failed: An operation is already pending. Then tried 7 drive: nada. Nothing. Tried again and found data on both.

Slapped the 7 drive back in again and it booted to desktop with pop-up "installing driver", then "Samsung device driver installed" and must reboot to apply changes. Switched back orig. sata cables to tray. Both Windows drives boot normally.

Figure it's some intelligence in the bios not liking sata connections. Belarc ID's bios as Award F2 06/22/2009, and SAMSUNG HD502HJ [Hard drive] (500.11 GB), SMART Status: Healthy. It's almost new. Tray is just simple connections.

Why wouldn't sata find at least XP via the other internal cables? That drive didn't give 'finding a lost driver'. What do you think is happening?
As a prescription, I'd shy from attempting update the bios if that means flashing.


Appreciate any feedback, when convenient.


Thanks very much,

Mac

 

[denis280]

What are your system spec.

 

[Mac29]

My system is a lowly:
Phenom II X2 550 (3.2), a GB GA-MA785GM-US2H (rev 3.3), Corsair cmpsu-400cx 400 watt, 2 GB Geil black dragon DDR2 (PC6400?) , radeon XT1900, and a CD and DVD drive. (Would post this info here but can't find out how, also can't find how to contact any help on this site.)

Thank you.

 

[denis280]

did you try with another sata cable.

 

[Mac29]

Second paragraph states I did.

 

[denis280]

Tried 7 drive internally on other sata cables

Sorry about this. but now back to the HDD.before flashing bios. try clear cmos.also the drive could be defect.i know HDD going bad and smart telling it is ok.so run again a CMD with CHKDSK. if all result come back ok then you could flash bios.