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Hard Drive Woes

M

MrIgoe

n00b
Joined
Dec 1, 2004
Messages
51
I have a WD250 and a WD120 for my 2 SATA HDDs. Recently I had bought an SATA power splitter that takes a regular 4 pin power and transforms it to 2 SATA powers. After doing a lot of wire management to hide my old 4 pin power plugs, I plugged my SATA splitter up to my 2 drives, closed everything up and booted, only to find the following error on startup: Error loading OS


So I change my boot settings to my DVD, pop in my windows disk for repair, and after loading all its bloatware, windows says it cant FIND any HDDs.

So, after messing with mobo settings (Asus P4G8X deluxe) I keep getting the same error, either it says Error Loading OS, or Windows Could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: windows/system 32/config/system

And then it says I can attempt to repair this by using the windows disk

So, I UNDID all my wiring, plugged in the original 4pin powers, and holy crap, its the SAME THING. I'm fairly certain I didnt fry BOTH HDDs at the same time, I can hear them spin up as they turn on, and the cooling fans mounted on them spin, So THAT must be getting power.

I suppose I have 3 questions then:

1) DID I fry BOTH my HDDs at once? If it was just a corrupted MBR then Why wont windows detect any HDDs

2) Is there a wrong way to plug in an SATA cable, as in, can they be put in backwards or something

3) Do you guys have any advice on what to do? I'm at my wits end :(

Any help appreciated


****EDIT****


Ok, MORE problems, I put my SATA drivers on a floppy to load in windows setup to see if maybe THATS why it couldnt see it, but NOW it says it cant find a floppy drive.

It sees my DVD and CDrom drives just fine, why would a mobo not see my floppy or my HDDs?
 
Do the drives detect in BIOS? Could you have plugged 1 into 2 and vice versa? Windows is picky about which order drives are installed in...

 
Yeah kinda, I have sort of an old motherboard, so my options for primary and secondary HDDs are "Auto" and "user defined HDD" so its hard to tell if the mobo actually detects them

Very briefly during start up it will show me having 2 HDDs and their size at the bottom of the screen, if I unplug one HDD it will only show one, so I think the mobo at least SEES them.

I tried changing them up, swapping cables, plugging one into 2 and 2 into 1 and all that, but it just gives me a different error.

If I plug in the main 250 with windows on it, it gives me the file not found or corrupted error. If i plug the second 120 backup without windows into SATA1, it says error loading OS.
 
Hmm....I used Duct Tape to route some of my wires.....would that do anything?


Just a thought. I'm in the process of taking it off now and using zip ties
 
No, duct tape isn't electrically conductive or made of metal. It isn't the problem. What it sounds like is the standard Windows is Broken. You can try using the Repair Console to fix it.
 
Question: When windows asks for third party SCSI drivers to see my SATA HDDs, is it asking for the drivers for my HDD or my mobo SCSI drivers?
 
It wants drivers for your sata card, which are implemented to overlay the Windows kernel's SCSI stack. I think. That's why they show up as scsi devices.

 
Ok So i've tried about 20 different kinds of Asus drivers on a floppy and windows refuses eveyr one of them, i put it in the floppy drive and it keeps saying Insert the disk into drive A.

Both my drives are SATA, so unless I can get windows to recognize, i doubt i can repair anything. I took it to eagle and they varified that neither to mobo or the HDDs are fried, so im guessing this is now just a BIOS problem
 
Make sure your floppy drive is working. get a boot disk and use that. if it cannot boot from the floppy, make sure your floppy cable is on correctly, you can't expect to load drivers from a floppy drive that isn't working.. Unlike HD's most floppy drives and cables can be connected upside down or right side up. One way gives you a floppy error, the other way works as intended. Once you have a working floppy, you should be able to load the drivers for the SATA controller on the motherboard and then repair windows or re-install.
 
Still no luck, I know my floppy iss workin, I can plug it up to my bro's comp and it works just fine, the drivers still aren't working. This is the most perplexing thing I've personally ever encountered.

Would a fried mobo cause something like this to happen?

To be able to see the volumes but not be able to load drivers for them?
 
Anything is possible when components get damaged. Will the machine boot from a floppy? make a boot disk that can read NTFS partitions too and see if it can access the drives, or make a BART PE disk and boot it up and see if it can access the drives, or a Linux CD to see if you can mount the drives and see the data.
 
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