PVR PC won't even boot to the point of starting windows?

[SWK]

- no western digital drives

- I cleared the CMOS but no luck, still get a corrupt HDD name in SETUP, e.g. under BOOT IDE HDD = "E@@ G@ 2"

- tried disconnecting floppy cable (1 connector) which doesn't help

- my 2nd PC is a laptop unfortunately

Very strange. In summary I can:

[1] 1 good HDD - boots OK to windows (my old HDD windows disk)

[2] 1 good HDD + either of my other 2 HDDs as slave ==> PC SETUP doesn't recognise either of the drives properly and displays only one which is labeled "E@@ G@ 2".

?

Can you do the following :

1. The good (old) HDD as Master on primary IDE
   
2. The bad (current) HDD as Master on secondary IDE (disconnect CD-ROM's, etc.) - check BIOS detects HDD correctly.
   
3. Boot from good (old) HDD
   
4. See if bad (current) HDD is visible in My Computer
   
5. If so, go to the command prompt and run chkdsk <x:> where <x:> is the drive letter of the bad HDD and report back the results (this will not try to repair your drive)
   
6. Otherwise try Disk Management (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management) to examine the second HDD and let us know its status.
   

This should help us isolate if the problem lies with the motherboard or HDD.

If its the HDD, then you could try to download a diagnostic program from the manufacters website, but most of them require a floppy - some supply bootable CD ISO images. This could tell you if the problem is 'just' data corruption or a physical problem with the HDD.

Do you have XP and a CD-Writer on you laptop ? If so you could try to create a bootable XP CD using BartPE which has some diagnostic s/w

[mixedup]

actually I'd just disconnected the 2 CD ROM drives and connected these to the two newer drives, i.e.

- OLD Working Windows HDD - primary master
- NEW Problematic Windows HDD - secondary master (or slave?)
- NEW Data HDD - secondary
- 2 x CD ROM (disconnected)

After booting up to windows and running explorer the PC could still NOT see either of the NEW drives. It did highlight one of them as a drive letter but when I clicked on it it asked "do you want to format", after which I turned off the PC.

[mixedup]

PS. This seems a bit like a NASA training session where you've got to consider whether the information the system is giving you itself might be faulty due to how its being collected I'm thinking of going into the PC shop tomorrow and spec'ing out a new PC, then I can place the new drives into it and really be more sure of what I'm seeing. The current one is about 4 years old. Hopefully if the HDD "index" sectors are damaged as a worst case I can find some software to help recover the data.

[SWK]

actually I'd just disconnected the 2 CD ROM drives and connected these to the two newer drives, i.e.

- OLD Working Windows HDD - primary master
- NEW Problematic Windows HDD - secondary master (or slave?)
- NEW Data HDD - secondary
- 2 x CD ROM (disconnected)

After booting up to windows and running explorer the PC could still NOT see either of the NEW drives. It did highlight one of them as a drive letter but when I clicked on it it asked "do you want to format", after which I turned off the PC.

That suggests your NEW Problematic Windows HDD master could be the problem. Try removing it and making the NEW Data HDD as master. If you can see your data OK, try connecting the NEW Problematic Windows HDD as a slave to your NEW Data HDD.

Let us know how you get on.

Sean

[mixedup]

I say pull out the battery and remove the jumper for CMOS and unplug the system and let it stand for 10 mins. Remember when doing this you'll have to reset anything back in the BIOS.

I actually tried this tipstir...I didn't do anything special afterwards in SETUP. Was there something specific I had to reset that wouldn't have been auto-detected.

Re ribbon cable, its getting a little hard to move the cable around in the PC. I might try to buy a new cable perhaps, I assume they're just a standard cable?

If its not the drive, and let say its not the cable, you mentioned controller - is this on the motherboard? if it were this what would be the repair concept?

PS. Going into spec out a new PC today actually. Worst case this 4 year PC can become a 1 HDD PC for the kids

thanks again

[soccerdad]

I am not a PC guru like the others guys in this thread, but I will share something that happened to me. I added a capture card once and when I rebooted, Windows had somehow lost it's directory structure. I still could see the drive, but as far as windows knew, it was empty. I ended up loading windows onto my second drive and used a program called "getdataback" from http://www.runtime.org/. The cool thing about the program is that you can use it to look at your drive for free and you only have to pay ($79 I think) for it if you want to recover your files back to another drive. It worked like a charm and save my a** since it had a bunch of family pictures on it.

Good Luck!

[callagga]

nice photos

Yep I've ordered a new PC. I was going to take the HDD and put it into the new PC and hopefully it will detect it. The worrying problem at the moment is that I can't get the old PC to detect it at the BIOS/setup stage, so I'm not sure the recovery software would even work, but at the same time whether it's really a controller issue.

I can keep the old computer as it is now as long as I don't have a 2nd HDD as slave in it it seems.

Cheers