Problem Recognizing SATA Drive....HELP!

My friend's computer doesn't load up so i went to check it out. It loads up to right after the Windows XP screen with the scrolling bar and then says {Bad Image Checksum}. I tried using the XP cd to use the recovery console but it says that it cannot find any HDD. I checked the BIOS and the Setup screen and both can see the disk. I'm not that familiar with SATA so if anyone can help out please let me know. thanks!

 

Windows XP was released before SATA, which means the XP CD doesn't have SATA support by defualt and it can't see a SATA drive. You have to use a driver disk once in the windows installer to install drivers before you can do anything with the setup or recovery console. (You'd press the F6 key when it asks if you have other drivers)

From the sounds of things there is nothign wrong with the drive itself, It just sounds like some of the files on it got messed up, so once you get in there with the recovery console you should be fine.

 

thanks coco....so would my friend need to get the driver disks from the HDDs then? are those downloadable?

 

The driver disk comes with the motherboard. Not the HDD's. They would be downlaodable but you can make your own from the motherboard CD. Usually the autorun actually has a feature that says make driver disk.

Please note, driver disks have to use 3.5" floppies. CD-Roms cannot be used. Which has been a problem for a lot of people in recent years.

 

okay i have the motherboard disk but i cannot search it on the broken computer because....well its broken. when i search it on my computer, it says "Detect No Proper Items" because its an ASUS mobo in my friends machine and i have a Pentium. What would i look for manually on the disk? It has these folders in the Drivers folder....

1. 4in1

2. AMD

3. Audio

4. Display

5. LAN

6. Promise

7. USB2

8. VIARAID

 

One addendum to this:

Are you running any sort of RAID configuration?

If not, then I'd check the bios, and make sure that SATA is running as IDE instead of RAID.

You may have to upgrade the bios for this to happen.

I have never (on newer revisions/bios updated) required a SATA driver on a NON-RAIDed machine in 8 months with SATA.

What mainboard are you using, what SATA drives are you using?

 

It's most likely going to be the Promise or VIARAID folder. I can't say for sure. You might have an easier time simply downloading the driver disk off the website. But the drivers you need will be in one of those two folders.

 

first....thanks for the help from both of you.....and its a ASUS K8V SE mobo and its 2 Seagates (80 and 120 GB). I'm pretty sure they were in a raid-0 config. Right now in the BIOS the OnBoard Promise Controller is ENABLED and set to RAID.

 

Okay, IF YOU KNOW FOR A FACT, that this was a RAID-0 (stripe) was set, then you WILL require SATA RAID drivers, follow CoCo's instructions on the path of said drivers.

Just note that RAID 0 capacity is not really safe and not fault tolerant at all. I.E. if a HDD is bad, then you must start over.

Also, since you think that the 80 and the 120 is a Stripe Set (Raid 0), then that 120 is wasted.

Since RAID 0 size is (Smallest drive size * number of drives). So, your 80 + 120 = 160, instead of 200.

 

On a side note #91:

Does the computer post? If so, you should see a screen that talks about RAID. There should be a key to press during this timeframe. Could be CTRL + F, could be F3, not sure.

 

okay...i better make sure what RAID is running for sure. Here's the newest updates though....i followed coco's instructions on uploading the drivers. It works fine and now XP setup recognizes both drives but when it goes into windows setup it goes a little bit (before it can even start uploading files) and it stops and says two messages but very quickly so i cant read them all. One says "Not enough system resources...." and the other says something about virtual memory. then it restarts the computer and just keeps looping.