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Need some urgent help

CKent

CKent

Diamond Member
A few weeks ago I set up dual booting with gentoo and winXP. I'm a newbie to linux, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to jump into the deep end for the purposes of learning it, since I always had XP to fall back on.

When I put in my new TB drive, windows had no issues with it and I spent a week or so just using windows, but when I tried booting into gentoo it gave me some kind of error and started looping it (the system wouldn't boot). The gist of the errors was "QC timeout", "HPA support seems broken" and "failed to read max address". I never let it go too long, I just tried it a few times, gave up and booted back into XP without issue.

Tonight after another week of flawless windows operation, I rebooted my PC and then went to get a snack, forgetting that after 30 seconds of giving me a choice it was set to auto-boot gentoo. The error must have looped until it froze.

Now I can't boot back into XP. BIOS takes a good 30 seconds to detect my original drive, and doesn't detect the big one at all. When XP tries to load it just sticks at the loading screen with that stupid bar looping endlessly.

Can anyone guess what happened and steer me toward fixing it if possible? I booted from the gentoo CD which sees all 5 partitions of the original drive no problem (the one which BIOS detects) but it doesn't see the big one. Both drives are sata fwiw.

Edit: Actually watched it boot from the CD this time and it takes a while to detect the drive there as well. And if it matters, I believe I had to set up each drive in its own raid array, my bios didn't seem to want to do it any other way (nforce). Some googling about the error messages I got didn't get me very far, but I do seem to recall reading something about linux not liking raids?
 
My only thought is that adding the new drive messed with the drive order as seen by the BIOS/OS (the boot drive went from #1->#2), which confused Gentoo and made it... do I'm not really sure what. Normally I would expect it just hang, not make any permanent changes to the drives. Not my area of expertise though, especially not with Gentoo.

Have you tried unplugging the new drive and booting into Windows?
 
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, without the tb data drive I can boot up normally to either OS, the 320gb drive is detected instantly, etc. I know someone who's a linux enthusiast and prefers gentoo, he suggested pretty much the same thing might have happened. The tb drive is still playing dead though, any thoughts? Could the mbr be corrupted, and how would I go about fixing that? Or could gentoo have actually fried the drive? I did try switching the sata ports they're plugged into but it seems the damage is already done; switching it did nothing.
 
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