Vista, SATA and multiple problems.....

[CrazyTired]

First of all, I'm going to go ahead and apologize in advance. I'm *crazy tired* right now and will probably word this all wrong 🙂

Basically.... My friends computer is pretty hosed and we need some help getting it back on the right track. Let's get the specs out of the way: A64 3000+, 1.5GB PC3200 ram, Radon 9550 (128MB) AGP. His mobo is a Gigabyte GA-K8U-939... He has a SATA drive along side 2 IDE drives.

The problem started a couple of weeks ago when he decided to install Vista...Although his XP install was pretty screwed up too since he has a bad habit of downloading viruses/malware ect. The first problem involved actually installing Vista.... From what I understand he partitioned his SATA drive and was going to try to dual boot it with XP. Although apparently every time he tried to do this he would get a BSoD during the installation process.

After that he decided to use one of his IDE drives to install Vista on... He said he got the BSoD doing this as well. Finally he tried to unhook his SATA drive all together and try it again, after which it seemed to install just fine. Problem is, once he hooked his SATA drive back up he couldn't dual boot. If he had it set to boot first, it still wanted to boot off the IDE drive. Since he uses his computer for work he decided to say "screw Vista" and tried to unhook the IDE Vista was installed on.. After that he just gots a message saying something like "Failed to find system disk" (Pretty sure that's not the exact error, but it's something like it) during POST

I believe this has something to do with SATA drivers, unfortunately I don't know much about sata drivers and neither does he. After looking at his mobo website we saw some sata drivers to load during an OS install, and the chipset which included sata drivers as well (So we thought?). I believe he used the chipset drivers and can currently run Vista with the SATA drive plugged in, but still cant' boot from the SATA.

Also, Vista is running VERY, VERY slow on his computer. I'm not entirely sure if it was running this slow without the SATA plugged in, but I don't think so. It's so slow that it's almost unusable, a rig running XP with 128MB of ram and running tons of background apps would run circles around his computer right now 🙂 Strange thing is, the Vista rating system thing still shows his computer at 4.2 or something.... Also, he's been saying that while in Vista he has been getting the BSoD randomly....

Right now he would do anything to just have the ability to launch XP or dual boot without having any problems at all. I was hoping that somebody here could give any thoughts on what could be going on and what he could do to fix this. I realize that I made a mess of my topic and probably made it hard to read, I apologize again 🙂

Thanks for any help 🙂

 

[hardcandy2]

1. You said he uses this computer for work, yet has a problem with "downloading malware and viruses"? He needs two separate computers, one for work and one for "downloading malware and viruses". Otherwise, someone is going to be getting all his business data if they haven't already. He needs to stop using P2P on a "work" computer.
2. You do not say if this is an Upgrade or Full version of Vista.
3. By installing Vista and switching around his hard drives, he has bonkered his boot sector. Time for a WinXP re-installation, followed by the Vista installation.
4. With that computer, Vista will run slow if he has the Aero desktop running.
5. Go to Spywarewarriors and look at the section, "If your computer is already infested", unless he does a clean install of WinXP. Even if he does a clean install, he will need to learn how to run Hijack this and look at a log file. Unless he mends his ways about "downloading malware and viruses".

 

[Kappo]

Originally posted by: hardcandy2
3. By installing Vista and switching around his hard drives, he has bonkered his boot sector. Time for a WinXP re-installation, followed by the Vista installation.

He can actually fix this by booting into the recovery console and doing /fixmbr or perhaps /format mbr without the vista drive installed.

Other than that, hes going to have issues if he has a "habit of downloading and installing malware" regardless of the OS.

 

[CrazyTired]

Originally posted by: hardcandy2
1. You said he uses this computer for work, yet has a problem with "downloading malware and viruses"? He needs two separate computers, one for work and one for "downloading malware and viruses". Otherwise, someone is going to be getting all his business data if they haven't already. He needs to stop using P2P on a "work" computer.
2. You do not say if this is an Upgrade or Full version of Vista.
3. By installing Vista and switching around his hard drives, he has bonkered his boot sector. Time for a WinXP re-installation, followed by the Vista installation.
4. With that computer, Vista will run slow if he has the Aero desktop running.
5. Go to Spywarewarriors and look at the section, "If your computer is already infested", unless he does a clean install of WinXP. Even if he does a clean install, he will need to learn how to run Hijack this and look at a log file. Unless he mends his ways about "downloading malware and viruses".

*
1. At this time, his *work* computer is also his personal computer as well. I don't mean to say it's a "serious" work computer.... To be honest he runs a pottery shop, the only work related things he does on his system involve sending e-mails and making ads. It's fairly serious to him since it's not a *mainstream* business, but it's far from being a *real* business rig. Overall, he at least has XP working for him before Vista came along, even if that did involve all kinds of popups/bandwidth suckers.

2. It's the full version. One of my first thoughts was that he choice the upgrade option as well, which is pretty well known for not being very stable... He assures me that he went with the clean install route.

3. That's the obvious answer that I've suggested way too many times. He isn't ready to reinstall yet.... (why? who knows) . We've been to the recovery console and he said he tried to to a /rebuild and fixboot, but apparently when he tries either one he says he has to run chkdsk first.... When he runs it from the recovery console it always says a problem found and resolved.... I guess it says this every single time he runs chkdisk. I don't think he would mind replacing the drive if it were damanged so long as he could recover the e-mail addys and such from Outlook without booting into WinXP. I don't think this is possible without actually running Outlook from XP though to back them up?

4. Yes.....his computer is pretty outdated by todays standards... However, I happen to know for a fact that it should be running at *least* 20X faster than what it currently is. I'm typing this on a 1.6Ghz Centrino laptop with 1GB ram and a 9600 Pro GPU. I'm currently running Vista Ultimate with not only Aero enabled, but with a 30min dreamscene background going...(Currently using about 30% CPU). Even with all of that, Vista is running as smooth as silk on my old ass laptop. I've even tested Vista with low performance settings on this old rig (underclock to 600mhz) and even though it runs horribly....It runs MUCH, faster than *his* is currently running. . Vista is no doubt a very demanding OS.....but he shouldn't have any performance issues on a clean install like this.

5. Well.....He knows the general idea of what he should and shouldn't download.... For some reason he likes to pick things up anyways. I suppose it may be some sort of OCD or something..... Although his surfing/downloading habits shouldn't have any effect on his current install of Vista....He can barely run his computer, let alone *gunk* it all up on this drive already.

((Ugh, still wake... I sorry if any of that came off as *rude* ....I honestly didn't intend it that way.))

Kappo---- Thanks for the tip...For some reason I missed that command.

So is the SATA driver thing not the cause of these issues?