HD Trouble, need help

[Ruhnie]

I built a new system this week, but kept my HD from my old one, a Seagate Barracuda 7800 300GB SATA. Just for grins, I tried booting into windows with all the new hardware, and surprisingly it worked...sort of. After starting to use the system, I got a couple of blue screens, so I knew a reinstall of XP was in my future.

I boot to the XP CD, but my partitions weren't there in setup. It displayed one partition as the C drive, and listed the space available at 137GB, less than half the actual drive space. I exited setup and tried to reboot back into XP. When XP is supposed to start loading, my system hangs, and the HD activity light comes on solid and stays on.

I tried running the XP recovery tool to get a DOS prompt. When I do a /dir command, I get an error message about the dir structure is bad or something similar. Trying to switch to the D drive (which was a partition I had), it says the drive doesn't exist.

What should I do? When I get home today, I will try changing out the SATA cord and switch where it's connected on the mobo. I'm also making a Seagate bootable diagnostic floppy. If neither of those work or tell me anything, I'm going to try putting the drive back in my old system and see if I can boot into safe mode or even see the drive. Any other thoughts? Thanks for any help!

 

[Swampster]

Enter your XP Recovery Console as you did before, and run "chkdsk /r" (without the quotes, of course). This will repair most file system problems.

Also, when you try to do the repair re-installation, do you hit F6 at the beginning and let it see your RAID/SATA drivers? If it sees the hard drive, but the controller's current driver is corrupted, then it will often give false information about the drive's configuration.

 

[Ruhnie]

Thanks for the reply. Will chkdsk cause me to lose any data, or does it just fix the boot sector and windows files?

As for the driver, I set up the disk in BIOS as an IDE drive, and not a RAID config. I thought I only needed to F6 if I was using RAID/AHCI (or is it ACPI I forget)?

 

[Swampster]

chkdsk /r repairs file structure problems as well as bad sections on the HDD itself. The only way it could cause you to lose data is if it in a location that is damaged beyond recovery . . . in which case, it is lost anyway.

In answer to your second question, a SATA drive cannot be set as an IDE drive, they are two separate things. It can be set as a stand-alone drive (as yours is) or it can be set up in a RAID array, but it is always a SATA drive.

Therefore, the answer is YES, it needs to see your RAID/SATA driver floppy that came with the system board.

 

[Ruhnie]

Now that I think about it, maybe it has something to do with windows trying to use the SATA driver from my old mobo or something. If that's the case, how do I clear that out? Would connecting the drive to another SATA connector force the XP CD to see the drive differently?

As for the IDE thing, that's how the Gigabyte mobo manual said to set it up, and I've read others say the same thing, that unless you're actually using RAID, you don't need the system driver. There is actually a BIOS setting for the drive that picks between RAID or IDE, there isn't an SATA option. This option is called something like "SATA Type". Not really sure what this does.

 

[Ruhnie]

Ok just to clarify, I looked up the info in my mobo manual. There is a setting for Onboard IDE/SATA Ctrl Mode with options RAID/IDE, AHCI, or IDE. I set it to IDE, since I wasn't planning on using RAID or AHCI. The manual then says that unless you are using RAID or AHCI, that you don't need to install a device driver during OS setup.

 

[Swampster]

Your BIOS is seeing the drive just fine . . . what is having problems is your operatings system . . . thats what needs the drivers, and thats what the "Hit F6" is referring to.

 

[Ruhnie]

It's not the drivers, windows is using the Intel ICH8 SATA driver, which seems to be fine. I bought another SATA drive to try and boot into and see if I could copy my data over. I didn't do the F6 driver install, and this drive is working fine. I'm fairly convinced that my boot sector or partition table got hosed. Here's what I've been doing:

- I ran the recovery console. Using the dir command responds with the error message "Error occurred during directory enumeration." Using the chkdsk /r command responds with an error similar to "One or more unrecoverable errors has prevented chkdsk from running."
- I attempted to reinstall XP. The setup screen does not show the correct partition information for my drive. I had created 2 partitions, one 30GB in size, and the other ~270GB in size. The setup only shows one unpartitioned space of 137GB.
- I attached the problem drive as a secondary slave. Once loaded into XP, both drives are recognized. When trying to access the problem drive, windows responds that it is not formatted.
- I have run the Seagate Online tools and diagnostics on the drive. It reports no errors or problems.

Should I just accept that my data is lost? Or is there any reason to try a data recovery service or other troubleshooting? Thanks again, especially if you read all of that

 

[Swampster]

Download a copy of Ultimate Boot Disk, preferably as an ISO file, and burn it to a CD.

It is a self-booting utility disk.

Under the section called Partitions there is a utility called DiskTest which might be just the thing for your problem. Read and follow the instructions so that you understand the options it is offering, because if you don't then you WILL need a data recovery service (Ontrack comes to mind . . . usually about $600, but they give an estimate before they start).

 

[Ruhnie]

<3 Kick ass. Will try that tonight. You rock!