Working SATA drive, suddenly will not boot up windows

I have a WD3200AAKS sata drive, I installed i in my system and used maxtor utilities to move everything over from my old 60 Gig Maxtor drive. This was an year ago been my boot up drive partitioned into a c: and E: drive, Also had a 80 gb Maxtor as D: drive. Motherboard was a K8N and this worked for last year.

A month ago I picked up a few viruses while doing some searches. The Trend Micro Pc cilian I had running missed them. I downloaded a antivirus software on my second pc and transfered it over, after running it I was able to use my pc again however I could not access the control panel and many other functions so it appeared my registry was corrupted, I hen downloaded PC tools and ran that program and after it corrected 232 errors everything was working fine, it ran his way for over a week. I did create a new user account on the computer with admin rights, it was not letting me add software under old user. However last weekend I changed users to check and the system was running pc tools, and seemed to be completing the defrag portion, I turned away and computer was doing a reboot. But then came up blank, I could get a menu if I hit f8 and choose safe mode however it would simply sit at a blank screen. The sata drive shows in Bios, however I cannot boot off my cd-rom with windows disk, again I get a blank screen. However if I unplug sata drive and only have IDE drive installed I can boot from windows disk, and it offeres chance to load windows onto that disk.
what is odd is I had been booting off the SATA drive for a year then suddenly it gave me these errors, I found I could not boot from CD while trying to fix the registry errors as I attempted to repair windows before downloading pctools.

Now while attempting to fix the errors above I reset the cmos jumper on the K8n motherboard and from then on I could not get a POST prompt, I have replaced the motherboard with a ASRock core2 dual-sata2 board, I plugged in the sata drive and I get the exact same issues. My work around has been to put in a older 80 gb wd800j hd, and load windows on that, I found if the IDE hd and not the SATA drive is the 1st HD I can boot from cd. after reloading windows I see the SATA drive as drive D: and drive f: and all data is fine, but I cannot boot from this drive.
So my current setup is
C: wd800J 80 gb,
D: Wd3200aaks Sata II drive (was old C drive and set to boot from)
E: Maxtor 80 gb (old D
F:Wd3200aaks SATA drive partitiion 2

I have been moving everything over from D: to C: and was goiing to format that partition and reload windows, but I am not sure this would work as everytime the SATA drive is setup in bios as first boot HD I cannot boot from cd or hd, I get a blank screen.

Please I would really like to resolve these issues, but not sure what to do. How do I get the system to boot from the SATA drive again?

 

If it was me, I'd back up every thing I needed, wipe the SATA and reinstall Windows. A pain but it may be what you have to do to use the SATA as the boot drive.

Sam

 

you also may have remnants of viruses, like a rootkit that has corrupted the MBR. by reinstalling windows, completely formatting the drive and overwriting the MBR could fix the problem, or you just might have a corrupted MBR and booting from the windows cd to correct the problem with the fixmbr command could fix it. The fact that it won't boot with the drive connected tells me there might be a physical problem with the drive itself.
you might want to start by using seatools for windows to scan the drive, since you can access it by booting from another drive. do a long test on the drive and see what happens.

 

Thank you for your replies,

Although I did not have issues before, I saw on the ASUS forums that others were having issues with SATA drives and the problems were similiar to mine. Blank screen, cannot boot from cd when drive plugged in.

I was hoping I could simply format the first partition on the SATA drive where windows was installed and convert it to NTFS this time, then reload windows.
It is the Second partition that has all the data I do not want to lose. As far as backup only thing I have big enough to backup too is a 60 GB Maxtor drive. Or use double sided DVD's.

I ran into a problem with the seatools, says I need NET meeting 2.0 installed