serial ATA and IDE together...

[hopelessliar]

My system 'was' running using a single serial ATA HD. (Asus A7V600 and Maxtor 160G serial ATA.)

Happily, the WinXP Pro registry has managed to become corrupt (the typical Windows\System32\Config\System shenanigans).

Now, I'm familiar with this problem and the subsequent recovery when using good old fashioned IDE drives, but it seems that when using serial ATA, it's impossible to get into the recvery console. (and yes I've done the F6 thing to add the serial ATA drivers). Boot just hangs claiming to be examining the disk.

I gave up on this approach and decided to reinstall winXP on a spare (IDE) drive and then do my editing on the corrupt files from there. The problem is, if I try to boot to this new drive whilst the serial ATA drive is connected, I can't. Boot hangs just after the WinXP splash screen. Going by sound, the IDE drive chugs along happily until just before the hang there is a small burst of activity (half a second?) from the serial ATA drive and then I'm in hang city.

Confused of London

 

[wolluf]

Sounds like the SATA drive's corruption is worse than you might have thought. Presumably you used F6 & SATA drivers when originally installing XP? If so, they should work for recovery console (they certainly do for me). If its stopping the IDE drive booting, sounds serious.

Have you tried Maxtor's diagnostic tool (maxblast) - available from their website - it has some repair functionality too (and it should give you a good indication as to status of your drive).

PS - presume you've done the usual 'check the connections & connectors'.

PPS - don't know if BartPE

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

would be of any help here (not sure if it can access SATA drives

 

[hopelessliar]

Cheers for the help here, I have had a go with maxblast but it didn't seem to help with anything more than formatting the drive - I'll take another look and also atthe link you've supplied. One thing I didn't mention before is that I have been able to view the contents of the disc under linux (2.6 kernel) but I'm not able to write to the ntfs partition to fix the corruption. This tells me fairly categorically that everything is still there, it's just the OS that is buggered.

 

[wolluf]

There's knoppix too - linux based but think it can read/write ntfs -

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

And sorry about Maxblast - I meant Powermax -

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/?epi_menuItemID=

3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068&epi_menuID=
976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&epi_baseMenuID=
976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&channelpath=
/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=22

 

[hopelessliar]

Sadly, knoppix can't write ntfs. Yet.

I'd never heard of BartPE but it looks like a very, very interesting thing! I was away this weekend so I haven't had a chance to see what it can do but even if it doesn't dig me out of this particular hole, I'm very glad to know of it's existence. Cheers.

Regarding Maxblast/Powermax:

PowerMax v 4.09 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 3, Force 4, VIA KT 600 and KT800 chipsets. If the hard disk is connected to an unsupported controller, it will have to be moved to an alternate system, or controller for diagnosis.

So there's no help there then...

I can't believe there isn't a simple fix for this. Trawling the 'modern internet' I've come across loads of people with the same problem but not a single fix. Maybe Maxtor will eventually throw me a solution...

 

[jpcw]

Hi, I have the exact same thing happening with Windows 2000, only there is no corruption that I know of. My system is the other way round, with the OS on the IDE drive and a new blank SATA drive that I'm trying to connect. The SATA controller is integrated on the MB, and is enabled through the BIOS. If it's disabled, Windows boots normally, but if not, it hangs on the splash screen and does the short burst thingy with the progress bar at about 75%. Weird. I can boot into safe mode with the SATA enabled, and I can see the SATA disk through disk manager and do formatting, partitioning etc. no problem, just not in normal mode. I think there must be a conflict on the driver or with the SATA bios somewhere, but because of the hang, the bootlog never gets written, and using the /sos switch in boot.ini only shows drivers loading during the initial [DOS-like] screen, so basically there doesn't seem a way to diagnose/ trap the error.

 

[BaudKarma]

What about one of those USB external hard drive enclosures? Put the bad drive in there, boot up off the IDE drive, and only connect the bad drive after everything is safely booted up and stable.

I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[smithe]

I have a user that zeroed out his hard drive and now is trying to reinstall XP. He has a Dell Dimension 8400 and it has a serial SATA hard drive. When trying to load xp, he presses the F6 key to load the drivers from the floppy he created and it shows the files being copied. He created the files on the floppy from the Resource CD and also tried downloading them from Dell's site. Now he's going to try the HD manufacturer website. However when he gets to the setting up Windows and presses enter, it says there is no hard drive detected. Anyone run into this before or have any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[smithe]

Sorry, didn't mean to put that in your thread.