f13.net forums - Yet another PC help thread.

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May 05, 2024, 09:22:42 PM

we're back, baby

Ok, so, one of the hard drives on my friends computer died recently (A Maxtor). It was the one with the OS on it, so he needed to reinstall windows. He decided to get one of those Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM drives (which I also have). Problem was that he didn't have SATA support on his motherboard so he had to go buy a card. Anyways, he does that, and I am able to eventually install windows xp onto the new drive and load up just fine. I had left the other two hard drives (the Maxtor that was broken, and a Seagate he uses for storage) unplugged through all this, so I could make sure the damn thing was installing to the SATA drive.

I powered off, and plugged in the Maxtor that had gone bad, to see if we could pull anything off. The OS read it fine when we rebooted, and he was able to get most of his information copied off (though some was corrupted). It seems that drive got partially fucked up (would a format actually fix that? Or is the damage perminent?).

So, now I plug in the Seagate drive he has, which works fine. When the OS loads, it gives me an error saying windows had failed to load last time, and it needs to run a scan of the disk. I say ok, and it scans the seagate disk I pluged in specifically. When the OS loads, everything is fine, and I can access that new drive just fine (It had it labbled as non-local disk however, which is kind of odd). However, when ever I restart the system, right before it gets to where XP should load, I get the message "Error Loading OS", and it just hangs. Now, if you reset the PC again, windows loads, and it gives me the same disk check as before, and then loads just fine, with he the hard drive working fine. Another reset gives the "Error Loading OS", error. So it goes back and forth every time you reset. Unplugging the Seagate drive causes everything to work fine, and the error goes away.

I cannot figure out what is causing this at all. The Seagate drive has no system files on it at all, so I don't know why it would cause such errors. It works fine itself. I have played with every master/slave/cable select jumper setting I can think of, which has no effect. At first I had thought it might have been trying to boot off the Seagate drive and not the SATA, thus the error, but that is not true. I set the boot order in Bios correctly. Setting it to try and boot off the other hard drive doesn't give the "Error Loading OS" message, it just skips that device in boot order. I have googled around and looked through many forums, trying things like making sure the hard drive had its own power connection and not shared with the video card (somebody claimed this had caused similar error for them). Nothing has worked. I cannot figure out what the problem is. My last resort will be to try and get all the information off the hard drive, then reformat it, but I really can't see how this would have an effect. And besides, my friend has GIGS of shit on that drive, and it will be a pain in the ass to try and find space for it on our network drives (especially if it doesn't actually change the situation, which is what I expect).

Please, if anybody has any idea, all suggestions would be appriciated. I'm really tired of working on that PC ;) .

The Seagate isn't somehow competing for resources with the boot drive? Haven't used a separate SATA controller card so I have no idea how the OS handles it, but might it somehow get mapped to a virtual IDE channel which clash with the Seagate's?

I assume you have tried the Seagate in the second IDE slot on the motherboard?

I had similar problems a while back when I connected an SATA drive. Turns out that my motherboard supports either two IDE channels or two SATA and one IDE. It actually ran with both IDEs and one SATA in use, but I got a lot of strange errors. Probably not related to your problems, but it doesn't hurt to try.

Yeah, think I checked all that before, though maybe I'll screw around with the second slot on the motherboard option again. From googling it seems this error is rather common when installing SATA drives, but what makes it happen seems to be different in almost every case, heh.

And I just noticed I posted this in the gaming forum. If a mod would like to move it to general that would be good. Sorry about that.

Actually, I moved it to gaming. We try to keep tech questions in this forum since the title of the forum does include hardware.

It definately sounds like a motherboard issue, like some of the early dual-video-card issues where the mobo wasn't sure which to make the primary display upon bootup. Might look and see if there are BIOS upgrades for the motherboard, check the changelogs first to see if the notes mention changes or fixes related to the issues you've been having. blind upgrades of mobo BIOS not always a good idea.

Alkiera

If you are running XP or Windows 2000 run the Computer Management application (usually under Administrative Tools) and go to Disk Management under the Storage item on the left side. Right click on the drive you want to boot off of and make sure "Mark Partition as Active" is greyed out. If it's not then select it to make it the active partition then try booting again.

Hmm, I seem to have fixed it. I actually thought of what you suggested, Trippy, not to long after posting. However, when I checked, the drive I wanted to boot off of was the active one, and the Seagate was not. But while fucking around in the Disk Management program, I had the Seagate converted to a Dynamic drive (which just means none system....right?). I rebooted, only to get the same error, so I figured I had failed yet again. I walked out the door right after that to go to work. My friend who owns the computer I was working on came by the house a few hours later, and called me saying it was working perfectly, thanks for fixing it, and how the hell did I do it? Well, uh....

So, either converting the drive (which still doesn't make much sense since it was not the active drive anyways) had a delayed reaction, or the PC gnomes came and fixed the computer right after I left my apartment. Either way, thank god.

Thanks for the suggestions though everybody, I appriciate the help. Looks like Trippy was somewhat closest with this particular answer, heh.