Troubleshooting boot problems following addition of SATA drive

S

Sanfam

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 20, 2003
Messages
174
I've run into a bit of a problem attempting to troubleshoot some hardware/software interoperability problems that came up earlier today as the girlfriend tried to install a new HDD. First, the details

Preliminary Details:
Asus K8V-X
AMD Sempron 3000+
512mb RAM (unknown speed)
Old HDD: 320gb Western Digital, SATA
New HDD: 750gb Samsung Spinpoint F1, SATA
Unknown old-model ATI video card

Symptoms:
The system will boot into windows without a hitch if the original system drive is connected to any of the two SATA ports on the motherboard. No problems whatsoever. But upon the addition of the new drive, the system bluescreens during late boot-up (just prior GUI load) regardless of port. (I do not have the exact message at this time, but the girlfriend will send it along when she returns).

My biggest problem is that I am not actually troubleshooting the system directly, but rather from over the phone, but my suspicion has been that the addition of the new SATA drive somehow offsets windows own drive incrementing or notation and causes problems. My original hypothesis was that the addition of the drive outright caused a hardware ID shift (such as /dev/sda to /dev/sdb under linux), but testing under an Ubuntu LiveCD showed no change in any of the configurations. Re-testing under windows resulted in the same crash. Disconnecting the new drive allows the system to boot again. I'm hoping the BSOD will further enlighten me, but for the moment I am going to have to wait on the details to come later tonight or tomorrow.

Are there any obvious possibilities I'm missing here or good ideas to try? I was thinking that windows is looking at the boot.ini file for early boot and perhaps shifting to another pointer later on but I have no way of confirming this. If anybody has any suggestions at all, don't hesitate to post.
 
Not sure if the Samsung drives have jumpers for SATA 150 and SATA 300 like Seagate drives do, but it might be worth checking out. That board only supports SATA 150 and that might be the problem.
 
That's a damned good point. I wonder if the OS could be failing to attempting to address the drive at that point during the boot and failing miserably. Of course, not being there is making this a real nightmare ;) I need to confirm whether or not Ubuntu recognized the drive.

Edit 1: BSOD Details:
Code: 
***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF7A2B528, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen, restart your computer.  If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
<snip>

This would appear to confirm some sort of late boot drive/driver snafu. But I'm not terribly positive where to take this. I'll keep posting details or results as they come along

Edit 2: Tried the SATA300 --> SATA150 bypass and no luck, it still fails. However, It may not have been an effective means of setting it as it turns out that this specific hard drive only has the jumpers enabled on certain variants (I have yet to confirm which this one is).

Edit 3: Idea! I think I might just attempt to teach the girlfriend to slipstream the drivers onto a CD, but I've run into another roadblock: She's increasingly stubborn and frustrated at the lack of meaningful progress and has started to get angry/frustrated/pissed off at the computer for it. *sigh* My belief that she'd be willing and able to actually do this without killing someone is fading, but I'm going to attempt it.

I hate remote troubleshooting.
 
Well, Followup time. Turns out, there was never any SDB showing up under linux. Miscommunication paved the way for needless experimentation and wordy forum posts. So now I need to figure out what the root problem is and go from there. Is it the motherboard? Is it the HDD? *sigh*

Could a moderator move this to General Hardware (no redirect needed)
 
Is this a new drive? Is it cleanly formatted?

If it's a used drive, there might be a windows installation already on it, and it's booting to that installation instead and blue-screening because the HAL doesn't match your machine.

Can the PSU handle the extra load? Maybe try disconnecting power from a CD/DVD drive and see if that helps.
 
This is a brand new drive. It is likely unformatted, but the problem is far more simple: It simply is not being properly detected by the computer. While I cannot verify this, the board in question does not appear to offer a list of drives detected by the SATA controller, thus making it difficult to genuinely confirm whether or not this is simply a driver issue or something else. But as mentioned above, Ubuntu 7.10 (LiveCD) failed to register the addition of the drive (which should have appeared as either SDA or SDB when connected alone).

Configurations tested, Boots to windows, Ubuntu detects second (new) drive?
SATA1, IDE - Yes, N/A
SATA1, SATA2, IDE - No, No
SATA2, IDE - N/A, No
SATA1, SATA2 - No, N/A (no CD-ROM drives to test with)

So far, frustration results. But I'm going to see if the folks over in hardware can offer up any suggestions. I'm unsure of the board's BIOS revision, as well. It should be current but I can't make the assumption. The longer this drags on, the more it feels like some level of hardware incompatibility is the cause.
 
If the drive is incompatible with the on board SATA controller it won't matter what operating system you try to check it with.

Post the exact model number of the new 750GB drive and we'll see if we can dig up some info. I'm guessing at this point that it's not compatible with the on board SATA controller but more info is needed to be sure.
 
Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gb, Model No. HD753LJ

I've been reading cases where people do actually appear to have this drive working on the board (Asus K8V-X, VIA K8T800 NB, VIA VT8237 SB), but this evidence only manifested itself after purchase. Anyway, an exchange seems likely. If anyone could provide a good source for determining this information in the future, please do post it up. ;)
 
Sort of a bump.

Decisions need to be made and two options exist. The drive in question can either be fit into an external USB enclosure which *is* confirmed as being compatible with the drive, or it can be returned and exchanged for a product of greater compatibility. However, I'm curious if there is a good resource for locating these compatibility problems before they strike, rather than troubleshooting after. Any ideas?
 
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