Hard drive failure at boot up

[cheecs]

Hi everyone,

As christmas is coming near, my PC started playing up with me. It was working fine untill today.

I created image of a disc using nero this afternoon and then strange thing hapened. My dvd drive disappear from the my computer. so I decided to reboot. now when I reboot my system I had my usb hard drive plugged in the system and it didnt boot so fair enough all I had to do is unplug my usb drive and reboot. but strange thing happend which never happened with my PC. do you know when PC boots up you can see lots of information on the screen. all of the information were in strange colour. ever alternate letter was in orange and the next letters to orange were in white colour. and system didnt boot.

So I powered off the PC and started again and it said boot disc failure. I can't even detect it from the bios. I tried going to bios and tried to detect it. but I can only detect dvd drive as secondary master. but for primary drive nothing

My PC configuration is as follows:

=======================================================
Item: AMD Athlon XP2600 333mhz 512 L2 Cache Barton Retail Boxed Inc
Heatsin & fan 3 year warranty-
Qty: 1

Item: Maxtor 6Y080M0 Plus 9 80Gb Serial ATA 7200rpm - OEM
Qty: 1

Item: Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe SKTA NVNorce2ST ATX 8xAGP Giga LAN, SATA,
Firewire, 6 channel Audio, USB2
Dual chan. DDR +WiFi slot (up to DDR400)
Qty: 1

Item: Corsair (VS512MB400) 512 DDR400 PC3200 STD Value Select Memory
Module
Qty: 1

Item: Sony OEM 3.5 Floppy Drive
Qty: 1

Item: Leadtek Winfast A340-T128 FX5200 128mb DDR Full Direct X 9, TV
out and cables
Qty: 1

Item: I-Cute 0314TL Black Atx Case With Side Window
Qty: 1

Item: Ebuyer Value 8cm Case Fan With Blue LED's
Qty: 1

Item: Sony DWD22A 16x Dual Layer DVD R/RW - OEM Black
Qty: 1

=======================================================


I would appreciate if anyone could tell me what to do. i'm not bothered about buying a new hard drive. but I'm more concerned about the data as I dont want to loose any of my file. I'm going to take my hard drive to my friend's computer and see if we can detect the drive on his pc.

Your help is much appreciated.

Cheers guys

 

[Devilfish]

If your just looking for that data to be recovered, you could try connecting up your master (boot) hard disk in another computer as a slave drive (remember and change the jumper) then you should be able to view it as a d: or e: or whatever it assigns. As you have a USB drive aswell, take that along too then you can connect that and copy all the data you want from the gubbed drive onto the USB drive.

You may have a virus on the hdd which has caused it to crash or it my just have died of natural causes! If it's too badly damaged you may not be able to see it at all.

 

[pleasebecool]

if ya know what you doing, take off the side of the pc. take all the power leads and ide leads from all drives. check they are all ok and put them all back in. if no joy there is one of two options, firstly there should be a jumper on the mother board, it will have 3 pins and a jumper of 2 of them, take the jumper off and move it over a notch so it covers the middle one and the opposite side for about 15secs then put it back, if you cannot find the jumper take a small coin cell out for bout the same time then put it back. then try and boot again.

i had a similar prob once, and it turned out to be a glitch on the bios and the above resets everything.

 

[Sonic]

Check your bios if sata drive enable to boot

 

[FAGAN]

The clincher here is the fact that it is a SATA drive, I suspect that your drivers have somehow got corrupted, the PC will no longer even recognise the drive without these - I suggest you do a reinstall or repair of Windows and remember to press F6 to install the drivers.

 

[cheecs]

Thanks alot guys for your help. I was thinking same as it may be possible that my SATA drivers got corrupted. however it should detect the drive in bios. but I'll do another freah install of xp and will overwriteeverything on c drive.

does anyone know that without sata drivers I can detect drive in bios...?

Cheers guys

 

[lone.gunman]

Cheecs, you need to check your BIOS settings me thinks...The SATA drive will be detected by the BIOS, but most likely you'll need to goto the on-board SATA controller settings to find it. Read your manual about SATA settings, depending on what mode you set it to will determine if system see's it as bootable. On my system when the SATA controller is set to AUTO, SATA disc 1 is detected as IDE1 Master...etc etc
Just double check the bus plug is ok on the drive, I think they are a bit flimsy myself, they always seem a bit loose to me..not like the old ide ribbons that take the strength of Arnie to pull 'em out -)lol
Also, if your going to do a re-install, make sure you've got the SATA driver install driver floppy (should have come with the mobo) and press F6 when you get to the first blue screen (says 'set-up is checking your hardware) during the windoze install.

Hope this helps..