For about 1 month before Christmas I upgraded my PC. It was healthy and running fine but I couldn’t help but think it could do better. I then came here to this forum to find out whether I needed Service Pack 2 to get the most out of it and up the performance. Having realised that ‘yes’ I needed service pack 2 I decided that on Christmas day I would freshly install Win XP Home edition which activated no problems after expecting to have to phone up MS. I downloaded SP2 and all necessary updates. Everything was going ok until I started installing Alcohol 120%. Suddenly it gave me ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ so I rebooted and tried it again and the same happened again so I gave up trying to install Alcohol and haven’t touched it since. I carry on with installing everything else and the motherboard suddenly found new hardware on itself as if losing some of the drivers that were already installed. Funny though it found the drivers that were already there and reinstalled them, all except for one. Windows said it found an ‘Unidentified’ device amongst the Sound, Video and Game Controllers. I tried getting the Wizard to find the driver, which only assumable would already be there somewhere. Windows said it was already using the best driver... er… ok whatever. So I tried reinstalling all the mobo drivers and audio drivers again from the CD but no, there was still this strange device so in the end I disabled it.
Feeling paranoid that things weren’t going quite right for me at this point I carried on regardless. Then I found that the sound wouldn’t work when I started installing games even though the sound worked fine on the desktop. I figured this must have had something to do with that odd unidentified device problem. Dawn Of War actually said I had no compatible sound card, which was the quencher. So I thought I’d reformat and try yet again from fresh.
Before placing in the Windows CD, booting from CD, letting it load the start up sequence and getting to the part where I choose where I want Windows installed I had 2 IDE ATA 133 Hard drives. 1x160GB Western Digital Caviar with a 20GB OS partition/140GB for everything else partition and 1x 80GB Maxtor Diamond Max slaved to it for backing up on to. Anyway the list of places to stick windows pops up and says that I have 1x160GB and 1x80GB to choose from. Partition-less and completely empty! How the hell? The 160GB HD is almost brand new and the smaller 80 HD for backup (not that, that did much good) is a couple of years old. I just wish I’d backed up onto my external USB drive too. But one never expects 2 HD’s to fail at once do they?
But that’s not all. The strangeness continues. I can no longer install Windows on to both of these hard drives anymore because they no longer boot up (on my system). I’ve attempted to reformat and install Windows on both of these drives and it formats ok, copies setup files, says it’s successful e.t.c and will reboot to continue with the installation process. Then it reboots and starts from the beginning again because it cannot boot from these hard drives anymore. When I tried to change the boot order so that the HD’s were before ROMs it actually says there is a read error. When it comes to choosing where to stick windows again it says there is already an operating system there and gives me the usual choice of repair or carry on installing Windows. I have tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and have still got no good results.
I borrowed my friends rather old Seagate 30GB HD and it worked fine. I could format it, install windows and it would boot. I could even slave one of the now unbootable drives to it, format it, access it and copy and use files to it. Formatting and using these 2 drives is possible if I slave them but I simply cannot boot from them.
So at this point it would be safe to say that the drives are somewhat damaged and I should forget about them right? Well here is the gob smacking part… how come when I lent them to my friend he could install windows and boot from them with his PC?
Ok so I figured that maybe my mobo IDE sockets have been damaged in the crash and developed some incompatibility issues with new IDE drives and not old ones like my friends? “Just some odd theory I tried to form in my scared little mind”. So I ordered a PCI IDE RAID card and installed that to test them again. Did it work? No! Same damn thing!
To be honest I don’t really need these drives to work again because I panicked and bought a SATA Hard Drive, which has been an absolute gem and lifesaver! Ever since the SATA everything has been absolutely perfect apart from when I still try to boot from those weird IDE drives. I still have not installed Alcohol 120% again either. And before you ask I HAVE tested the memory with 2 different memory testers and it all passed numerous times.
But for fudge sake if anyone can make any sense out of all this I would be most grateful because it simply frustrates my fragile little mind as to how anything like this can be possible. I can’t even send any of it back to the shop either. If the hard drives work in my friends PC then the shop will have a reason to send it back when they test it in their own PC’s and they end up working for them too and the same goes for the Mobo. If my friends old HD works in my Mobo then the drive that the shop tests might work with it also. So I’m likely stuck with them either way.
I’ll never tinker with computers on Christmas day again I swear it!
My System:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ CPU
Abit KN8 SLI Nforce 4 chipset Mobo
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB Video Card
Corsair 2GB PC3200 DDR400 RAM
WD SATA Hard Drive 250GB
Feeling paranoid that things weren’t going quite right for me at this point I carried on regardless. Then I found that the sound wouldn’t work when I started installing games even though the sound worked fine on the desktop. I figured this must have had something to do with that odd unidentified device problem. Dawn Of War actually said I had no compatible sound card, which was the quencher. So I thought I’d reformat and try yet again from fresh.
Before placing in the Windows CD, booting from CD, letting it load the start up sequence and getting to the part where I choose where I want Windows installed I had 2 IDE ATA 133 Hard drives. 1x160GB Western Digital Caviar with a 20GB OS partition/140GB for everything else partition and 1x 80GB Maxtor Diamond Max slaved to it for backing up on to. Anyway the list of places to stick windows pops up and says that I have 1x160GB and 1x80GB to choose from. Partition-less and completely empty! How the hell? The 160GB HD is almost brand new and the smaller 80 HD for backup (not that, that did much good) is a couple of years old. I just wish I’d backed up onto my external USB drive too. But one never expects 2 HD’s to fail at once do they?
But that’s not all. The strangeness continues. I can no longer install Windows on to both of these hard drives anymore because they no longer boot up (on my system). I’ve attempted to reformat and install Windows on both of these drives and it formats ok, copies setup files, says it’s successful e.t.c and will reboot to continue with the installation process. Then it reboots and starts from the beginning again because it cannot boot from these hard drives anymore. When I tried to change the boot order so that the HD’s were before ROMs it actually says there is a read error. When it comes to choosing where to stick windows again it says there is already an operating system there and gives me the usual choice of repair or carry on installing Windows. I have tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and have still got no good results.
I borrowed my friends rather old Seagate 30GB HD and it worked fine. I could format it, install windows and it would boot. I could even slave one of the now unbootable drives to it, format it, access it and copy and use files to it. Formatting and using these 2 drives is possible if I slave them but I simply cannot boot from them.
So at this point it would be safe to say that the drives are somewhat damaged and I should forget about them right? Well here is the gob smacking part… how come when I lent them to my friend he could install windows and boot from them with his PC?
Ok so I figured that maybe my mobo IDE sockets have been damaged in the crash and developed some incompatibility issues with new IDE drives and not old ones like my friends? “Just some odd theory I tried to form in my scared little mind”. So I ordered a PCI IDE RAID card and installed that to test them again. Did it work? No! Same damn thing!
To be honest I don’t really need these drives to work again because I panicked and bought a SATA Hard Drive, which has been an absolute gem and lifesaver! Ever since the SATA everything has been absolutely perfect apart from when I still try to boot from those weird IDE drives. I still have not installed Alcohol 120% again either. And before you ask I HAVE tested the memory with 2 different memory testers and it all passed numerous times.
But for fudge sake if anyone can make any sense out of all this I would be most grateful because it simply frustrates my fragile little mind as to how anything like this can be possible. I can’t even send any of it back to the shop either. If the hard drives work in my friends PC then the shop will have a reason to send it back when they test it in their own PC’s and they end up working for them too and the same goes for the Mobo. If my friends old HD works in my Mobo then the drive that the shop tests might work with it also. So I’m likely stuck with them either way.
I’ll never tinker with computers on Christmas day again I swear it!
My System:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ CPU
Abit KN8 SLI Nforce 4 chipset Mobo
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB Video Card
Corsair 2GB PC3200 DDR400 RAM
WD SATA Hard Drive 250GB
