PC wont boot in XP after bios flash

[nubietx]

Tforce P965 - MB
Western digital WD1600AAJS - HD

Bios was flashed to p96ba403.bst per vendor when I mentioned that the system did not appear to go into power save mode.

The system came up initially and I shut it back down to remove the floppy drive (NO USB) and close case up.
When it rebooted it wrote out - Windows could not start successfully - select

SAFE
SAFE with networking
SAFE with command prompt
Use last known good configuration
Start windows normally

When ANY of the above options are selected, windows STILL will not start

SAFE mode hangs at giveio.sys driver and system resets

Last known good shows file check bar accross the bottom of the screen and still will not start - systems goes back to screen to select windows startup mode.

Tried rolling back bios, still does the same thing.


When attempting to run UBUNTU from CD, it gets I/O errors even when BOOT FROM CD is started.

If the HD is disconnected - UBUNTU will boot fine. But if the HD is connected after UBUNTU is up, no drive can mounted on O/S.

When trying to boot windows from CD, system willl not allow the user to press pf6 to load external driver for SATA HD. For that reason, windows says it does not have a HD to install windows OS.

 

[mechBgon]

When a BIOS is flashed, it might revert to default settings. One setting that could cause trouble if it changed, is the Serial ATA controller's operating mode. I think your motherboard would have three modes: RAID, legacy/IDE, and AHCI. If you're not positive which mode it was in when Windows was installed, it was probably either legacy/IDE/whatever or AHCI, not RAID, so toggle that setting in the BIOS and see if Windows boots now.

If that doesn't work, you might want to set the controller to legacy mode and do a Repair Install, method 2. In legacy mode, or whatever term they chose to use for it, you shouldn't need to provide SATA drivers.

 

[nubietx]

No options exist in bios for selecting sata mode - the MB is the base model with no RAID feature.

I copied the ICH8 files from the biostar utilities CD to a floppy. Later in the windows setup (when loading from windows CD), it did prompt me to load external drivers. I did that and setup continued - BUT after selecting Repair in step three of "method 2 Reinstall" it STILL indicates no harddrive exists for windows.

3. You receive the following message on the Welcome to Setup screen that appears:
This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer:

To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.

To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.


When I FIRST installed XP on this MB back in april, I had to hang an IDE drive on a cable just to get XP to even get to the point of it recognizing ANY installed drives - the sata was listed along with the IDE. I guess thats the next step :/

EDIT 11:35 a.m.

I added the IDE device and windows will now accept recovery mode. But the C drive - (the SATA) issues a enumeration error when I try to do a DIR. Both partitions of the IDE drive are recognized fine. I guess I get to reinstall?

 

[nubietx]

Well, I tried installing Windows on the IDE drive and getting the data off of the sata before I installed windows on it - NO GO. Unrecognized format for SATA - even systemworks wont access the drive. I guess I get to format it. :/

So much for that data.

 

[mechBgon]

 

[nubietx]

can anybody recommend any good data recovery SW? - Theres a couple of TXT files I was working on for work that I would like to try to get back.

Even if its limited to 10 for the demo I think that would be ok.

 

[mechBgon]

There are some listed in this thread. Good luck!