The Curse Of Christmas - Strange HD failure? 1

[shockwolf]

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

 

[wolluf]

About the 2 drives - did you ever try installing windows with only one drive connected? (I NEVER install XP with any expected slave drive present - always connect it after its all up and running). It sounds like you may have installed to the 30GB Seagate on its own. And how were the drives jumpered? You said small was slaved - so presume on same cable. I find cable select works best (rather than explicit master and slave - which may also need a master with slave present setting for the master) on drives nowadays.

And have you run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities on the 2 drives - give you a proper idea of their status?

 

[firewolfrl]

Follow wolluf's suggestion using only one drive connected to install windows on the computer

OK…now to your issue
It is a very simple issue I think

The main partition is not considered ACTIVE

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315261

Fix boot and fixmbr do not necessary make a partition active to boot

Here is a site to get some boot disks

http://www.bootdisk.com/

I would wipe all the extra partitions on the drive and just install on the one primary partition

This is an alternate fix and should work very well
Download Powermax from the Maxtor site (it does not matter what brand your drive is)

Make the floppy or CD image

Run the program and Zero out the whole drive (time consuming) or just zero the MBR boot sectors (fast)

On the clean empty drive and install windows don’t do the quick format if it asks do the full

Windows should install completely clean

 

[firewolfrl]

here is the PowerMax 4.23 Bootable CD .ISO image file

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...ftware+Downloads/All+Downloads&downloadID=113

 

[shockwolf]

Wolluf, sorry I forgot to mention that I had already tried the Drives on their own yes. That was the first thing that came to mind when I began experimenting. I also checked and changed the jumpers as necessary. What I hadn’t tried however was cable select, though I have now and it still has not solved anything. I never used Cable select before because although you find it works best on the same cable it hasn’t always worked for me. I’ve had problems were the computers I’ve had in the past can’t determine which drive to use for master and slave and refuse to detect them all together. But then again that’s the kind of luck I have with PC’s. :-S I also forgot to mention that I did run the Western Digital diagnostics software. One that works in windows though whilst I was slaving them to my friends working drive and it did not report any problems. I’ve also tried using different IDE cables.

Firewolfrl as I mentioned the partitions were already wiped in the incident so I had performed a full format with just one primary partition. Are you sure a hard drive can be used at all if the partition is not active? I can still slave it, format it and write to it no problems and I did not think this was possible if a partition was not active. Disk Management treats it like it’s active and says it’s healthy. It just refuses to boot from either of these IDE drives which is why Windows can’t continue to install and I don’t get any NTLDR is missing errors as mentioned on the Microsoft site either. Also is it still possible for them to work and boot up fine on my friends PC if the partition is not active?

I have downloaded and created a bootable CD using PowerMax as you have recommended. I am doing each test down the list in turn however when I get to the Low Level format (full) I think I will leave that one over night as it recommends because it takes several hours. Then we’ll see what happens. This should be very interesting and thanks for your help guys.

 

[firewolfrl]

LOL sometimes the boot sector does not read the main drive as active for some reason....in another computer it does not matter...in your computer with the issues its a big thing because the MBR is not playing nice

Format is not good enough when you have an error like you are having.....I am a firm believer that a low level zero type drive format does wonders....if the drive is bad the zero process will pop up with an error and will not complete
if the drive is good then the zero from the beginning of the drive to the end of the drive including ALL of the MBR sector every stinking bit is zeroed. this is real important especially in the MBR because format does not format the mbr and there is quite the data section in the MBR... from viruses to the company Intuit use the extra room in the boot sector that is not used by windows or the NTFS file system for MFT data....some companies use this area for copy protection of their software and virus designers love this area because of the fact that it is not formated...
When you run FixMBR it does not wipe the entire MBR only the portion it needs to repair


I think the low level should fix your issue


I wish you luck

 

[Xenomorph1979]

Hi this is Xeno and Shockwolf is a buddy of mine.
I withnessed all the drive horror in real time i can say and i still dun get it how installing to one drive can format 2 other total seperate drives?

Igot and older pc with a P4 and atm i got one SATA drive as C:, and 2 IDE drives as D: and E:
The D: is for my games and the E: is my documents drive.

When i reinstall XP i allways disconnect my D: drive so no funky things can happen with that.

Basicly i got the same setup as Shockwolf here i think and it allways worked fine to me.
Lately, just before Shockwolfs nightmage began i also reinstalled xp with SP2 in it.

I also allmost shit my pants since when i connected the drives again they turned out empty, only this wasnt the case luckyly.
All i had to do was go to disk management and concert them to another kinda patition, like translating them so they would be useable for SP2.

This is why i still dun get what went wrong in his case with his 2 drives since i never had any problems.

At my documents drive i still got 30 gig unpartitioned space left so i still gotto merge that with the rest sometime.
Not before i backed it all up on ma EXT-HD of course because one wrong click and bye bye everything.

 

[shockwolf]

Firewolfrl youre a genius!

All the tests passed so I did the Low Level format (quick) and you are correct! It has solved the issue! Thankyou,Thankyou,Thankyou!

So basically the MBR was screwed? So you think a virus possibly got on during the fresh windows install and infected them both? Or maybe during the initial crash both hard drives suffered MBR corruption?

I don't think I'll bother with partitions anymore. After an incident like this I really can't see the point.

It's still weird how they worked on my mates PC though.

 

[firewolfrl]

you probably had a bug from before that infected all drives...including any floppy disk.
that can be a common issue

 

[firewolfrl]

and I am glad it worked