Suddenly I can't load Windows again...

M

mtx

Gawd
Joined
Sep 27, 2005
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717
All was well for one month and a half until 2 days ago. I turned on my computer, came back 5 minutes later, and I see that my HDD is busy doing something (I don't know what it was doing). It appeared that my system was completely frozen (couldnt do anything) so I did a hard reset...that's where everything went bad, and then worse...Windows refused to load, saying that I was missing a file called "pci.sys"..it worked 1/20 resets but after that it stopped working and kept giving me the same error message..I go to recovery console to try to fixboot, chdksk, and almost everything else possible, but it could not read the drive Windows was on (Windows was installed on my RAID-0 with 2 Raptors)..

This is what Norton Ghost 9.0 said about one of the Raptors when I loaded the Ghost bootup CD and TRIED running some diagnostics tests:

Error #119: partition ends after end of disk
ucEndCylinder (18078) must be less than 9039.
Disk Geometry error(s) detected on this drive. (POPUP)

it seems that the partition tables on one of the Raptors in the RAID-0 config screwed up THUS screwing up everything..SO i take off the RAID-0 config, format each drive, and reinstall Windows XP on the Raptor that had the aformentioned error above. It installed fine, but on my next reboot, after it says "VERIFYING BLAH BLAH", it gives me an unreadable error message in weird symbols. This leads me to believe that the Raptor is partically dead and dying...but I can't be sure until I run some SMART/HDD tests...

SOOOO I install Windows XP on my other Raptor, but now I get these error messages RANDOMLY in no selected order:

A reading error has occurred.
Please press CTRL ALT DEL to restart.

NTLDR is missing.
Please press CTRL ALT DEL to restart.


The frequency of experiencing these errors are VERY HIGH if I have 2 or more HDDs (I have 4) connected to my motherboard. If I just run the 1 HDD that contains Windows, it almost loads into Windows (except for when I had the error with weird symbols)..So what is the problem? Why is this motherboard so random with HDDs? 1.5 months ago, I had the same errors AFTER installing my RAID-0 setup, but suddenly started working when I had 4 HDDs plugged in. Now I can barely load Windows with 2 plugged in. I doubt any of the HDDs have problems (except for that Raptor I mentioned), they pass the POST SMART test, and they certainly worked 100% fine in my old NF3 setup. I'm also running a heavily OCed system, but I doubt that has any effect on the HDDs. All 4 HDDs are on SATA ports 1-4 which AFAIK are locked. I even ran @ optimized defaults and the same problems came.....

Can anyone help me?

I want to be able to run and load up 4 HDDs at once without unplugging and plugging, which doesnt work sometimes since Windows is dumb and doesn't always display a hotplugged HDD...
 
Well I just ran Norton Ghost 9.0 Boot disk and of course, I cant test the drives...
my data drive is fine, one of my other raptor shows that it's fine (but i cant test it), but the 2nd raptor shows this error:

Error #119: partition ends after end of disk
ucEndCylinder (18078) must be less than 9039.

Disk Geometry error(s) detected on this drive.

Is the raptor dead or has the RAID-0 simply failed EVEN THOUGH it says healthy in DOS?
 
Wish I could help but I can sympathize with you. I tried RAID 0 and like you found it more of a pain than it was worth. Rebuilding the array over and over sucks. It's not very tolerant of hard resets and lockups. After the third time around I gave up and went back to a non raid setup. You could try booting from your CD and doing a repair, you will have to load your raid drivers with F6 like you did during the install. I wish you luck. ;)
 
alphanumeric said:
Wish I could help but I can sympathize with you. I tried RAID 0 and like you found it more of a pain than it was worth. Rebuilding the array over and over sucks. It's not very tolerant of hard resets and lockups. After the third time around I gave up and went back to a non raid setup. You could try booting from your CD and doing a repair, you will have to load your raid drivers with F6 like you did during the install. I wish you luck. ;)
Click to expand...

Too much of a hassle, I spent 2 hours trying to repair but kept saying access denied.

I just took off the RAID-0 and installed on a single raptor. Strangely, it STILL screwed up, so Im suspecting one of my Raptors is dying. After the post says "Verifying blah blah", I get a set of weird symobls (unreadable)...sometimes it says NTLDR is missing.. or A READ ERROR HAS OCCURRED....is it my HDD? or my motherboard? Or simply windows being stupid?
 
Could be hard drive, motherboard, or maybe even ram. Bad ram will give you all kinds of installation errors. Download and run memtest from a floppy to test the ram. You should be able to download a free utility to test the hard drives from the drive makers site.
 
The funny thing is, this only happens when I have all 4 HDDS plugged in (2 raptors, 1 Seagate 400gb, 1 WD 400gb). If I only have 1 raptor plugged in, it almost always works. I installed XP on my OTHER raptor and it seems to be running fine now. I think the first raptor may be bad but I havent run any tests on it yet. Is it true that you can't run multiple hard drives on a NF4 board?
 
? Maybe it's a power supply problem. Maybe it can't supply enough juice for that load. Assuming you don't have a resource conflict, I would think any motherboard should be able to handle more than one drive and drive type if it also has sata. More than one bootable drive can mess things (XP) up though.
 
alphanumeric said:
? Maybe it's a power supply problem. Maybe it can't supply enough juice for that load. Assuming you don't have a resource conflict, I would think any motherboard should be able to handle more than one drive and drive type if it also has sata. More than one bootable drive can mess things (XP) up though.
Click to expand...

Hmm...just bought the OCZ GameXstream 600W.....I ran it on SLI for a week and no probs..why would it act up now when Im doing practically nothing?
 
mtx said:
Is it true that you can't run multiple hard drives on a NF4 board?
Click to expand...



I run 3 SATA drives on my NF4 board.....overclocked too......no issues...in fact, I run at fsb of 325 and multiplier at 8x for the cpu. The pci bus is locked down well on this board (Abit AN8).
 
mtx said:
Hmm...just bought the OCZ GameXstream 600W.....I ran it on SLI for a week and no probs..why would it act up now when Im doing practically nothing?
Click to expand...

OK, it's probably not a power problem. :D
 
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