SATA drive no longer boots Win XP Pro

[stevolutionary7]

Hi all, hope someone has encountered what I'm stuck on. I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard with 4 gigs of RAM and three hard drives: an IDE and two SATAs, one of which is my boot disk. This morning I got the "Boot disk failure, insert Windows CD" message. When it posts I can see all three drives, but the two SATAs come up as IDE- I'm not sure if this is a new setting or not. BIOS shows the correct SATA as the boot disk. Windows recovery can't see either SATA drive when all three are plugged in, but can see the boot drive when it alone is plugged in. I have no idea what changed between last night and this morning.

Most of the posts I've found on this topic have to do with SATA drives not being recognized during an install. But mine has been up and running for over a year with this setup. My best guess is that an update has corrupted an SATA driver, and the motherboard switched them to IDE compatibility. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[bludgard]

Hi,stevolutionary7.

Welcome to Windows Forum.

Have you any restore points to revert back to prior to this issue?

And back-up image media that you can use to re-image your boot sector?

[stevolutionary7]

Hi,stevolutionary7.

Welcome to Windows Forum.

Have you any restore points to revert back to prior to this issue?

And back-up image media that you can use to re-image your boot sector?

I have restore points, but no back up media. I was hoping I could access the restore points, but I'm not sure how. Going to Windows recovery after booting from the CD gets me to a command prompt. The ultimate thing I could do would be to reinstall Windows on the SATA, but the installer doesn't recognize the hard disk. I'd prefer a less invasive action, of course.

[-pops-]

Assuming the machine is fairly old (as it's using XP) does the motherboard have built-in SATA drivers?

I recall in the early days of SATA drives that they required motherboard drivers to be installed before anything much could be done with them. It may be that, as you suggest, these have become corrupted.

I also recall the problems I had with early SATA drives on XP and I ended up going back to IDE for the "C" (boot) drive as SATA's were so unreliable. This is not the case with more modern machines, though.

[stevolutionary7]

I'll have to check the motherboard manual, but it's not that old. I upgraded about two years ago to the new mobo, added the SATA to boot from and kept the old IDE with my files. Last year I added a larger SATA for backup only. When I installed XP onto the SATA it was just before they stopped selling it. I'll give it a look at lunch and report any additional findings.

[stevolutionary7]

Okay, so it was originally set to the IDE compatibility mode in the BIOS. Switching it to AHCI doesn't fix it. When you boot the windows CD and choose install it doesn't recognize the drive. The mobo CD has SATA drivers- I'm going to have to figure out how to install them. Here's my mobo:
/>http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2930#ov

[bludgard]

Okay, so it was originally set to the IDE compatibility mode in the BIOS. Switching it to AHCI doesn't fix it. When you boot the windows CD and choose install it doesn't recognize the drive. The mobo CD has SATA drivers- I'm going to have to figure out how to install them. Here's my mobo:
/>http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2930#ov

Hi,again. :)

I have had a few ideas from reading over your posts but maybe you could find some help from this link:--->http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/148443-resolved-sata-drive-not-recognized-cant-enter-recovery-console-repair.html

Others will be around shortly to try to sort you out I'm sure.

Sorry I could not help you out any further.I missed the part about not being able to boot-up in your first post-my bad. :lol:

[stevolutionary7]

While it may or may not be my exact issue, its a heck of a lot closer than what I've been able to find online (clean install problems), and it gives me some things to try. I don't have access to another floppy drive (and I'll have to install one into this machine) to use the F6 SATA driver install, although I'm pretty sure this motherboard has it onboard. The good news is that the BIOS can see my drives- only Windows can't. The strange thing is that when I log into the recovery console, and only the SATA drive is installed, I can still see an installation to repair. Yet if I were to go to Install from the Windows XP CD it wouldn't be able to find the drive. Very odd.

If I can get into Recovery Console I'll try fixboot when I get home.

Thanks for all your help- this is so frustrating!

[Boris]

Why not use nLite
/>http://www.nliteos.com/guide/

to slipstream your SATA drivers into your XP CD ?

[stevolutionary7]

So I managed to put the .exe SATA driver file on a floppy and install a floppy drive into the machine. Its missing the .oem file and won't install.

Then I tried recovery console again, was able to access the drive and ran fixboot- got an error. Ran fixmbc and it did a rewrite of the boot sector. Now when I try to boot the drive I get the NTLDR is missing error. Any thoughts?

I am able to install windows over the previous installation, but since it said My Docs could be erased I decided to wait.

[stevolutionary7]

Okay, so I looked up how to fix the NTLDR is missing error and copied two files. Shes back! Slow, but back. I'm still getting an error right before the Windows splash screen which I'll have to diagnose. Everything seems to be in order. Thanks for your help.

[bludgard]

I take it that things are continuing to run as you wish.

Thank you,stevolutionary7 for keeping us up to date. ;)

Glad it's all sorted.(For now :lol: )