Re: Mystery solution to problem maybe caused by Motherboard
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:03:11 -0400
km wrote:
On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:44:33 +0100, km <> wrote:
On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:29:26 -0400, "Jan Alter" <bearpuf@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
<km> wrote in message news:483g95dlceid8clcv2udf7ngvrno67dnr5@xxxxxxxxxxI posed the following question in uk.comp.homebuilt:
"I put together a PC at the beginning of last year, for a Charity I
help.
This week it would not boot up. The WinXP options appear but it will
not progress to Safe Mode or Last Configuration could not get to C:
prompt. I put the WinXP disk in to do a repair but could not progress
beyond "Set up is starting Windows".
It has a SATA HDD installed so I put this in another PC which "saw" it
and I recovered the Charity office files for future use.
Ultimate Boot CD shows CPU and memory and HDD have no faults. The HDD
apears in the BIOS and when I switched the SATA drive for a PATA (IDE)
drive the BIOS identified it. There is only 1 IDE slot so I put the
replacement drive on that as well as the CD. The BIOS recognised it
but again I could not load WinXP - it stopped at the same place. I
have tried different installation CDs in case of surface scratches
etc.
I am now considering a PCI-SATA Controller card to take the SATA dive
and byepass the motherboard controller for the SATA and IDE.
Clearly the CDRom works as I ran the Ultimate CD from it but I cannot
get the HDDs to work correctly.
Any ideas? Has part of the motherboard failed? Will a PCI card accept
the SATA drive successfully in these circumstances?"
Following various suggestions I did the following:
I changed, memory, PSU and also used floppies to try and load WinXP
with no success.
Eventually someone suggested that I load VISTA. I did this just after
changing the PSU. I had a struggle removing the old power connector so
I may have knocked something. In any event the VISTA attempt
succeeded.
When I loaded WinXP Home previously I did not use additional drivers,
it was a straightforward non RAID installation.
In view of the success with VISTA I am loathe to go back and give
WinXP a try.
Has anyone here got any thoughts on what may have happened?
I am posting here to check a different group of participants,
particularly KONY who I have always thought very knowledgeable.
km
In view that VISTA loaded on the machine but would not for XP I would think that if you were attempting to install XP on this older computer you had need to hit the F6 key and load the SATA drivers for your motherboard so that XP would see the drive and continue installing. VISTA already had SATA drivers available, but not so for XP. If you can get over the 'loathing' and want to try it again then go to the mb maker, download the SATA drivers, put them on a floppy disk and hit the F6 key when requested during the XP installation.
I successfully loaded XP with just the XP disc when first putting this
system together.
"Loathe" in this context means I am wary of making a fresh attempt as
opposed to actually having any distaste for XP.
km
or more accurately "loath".
Set up info:
Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2L
Intel Dual Core E2180 2.0Ghz
1GB DDR2 667mHz
Maxtor 80GB SATA
km
Board uses an ICH7.
Two PATA, four SATA, no RAID or AHCI.
In Combined mode, only four of the six storage devices should work.
In Combined mode, anything from Win98 onwards can be installed without drivers.
(Combined mode makes four of the six interfaces look like they are
PATA with IRQ14/IRQ15 and I/O space mapping, just like Win98 or any
later OS could handle.)
In Enhanced mode, all six storage device options should work.
In Enhanced mode, WinXP at Service Pack 1 or later is recommended.
If the CD is not SP1, SP2, SP3, you could slipstream a Service Pack into
the disk and use it that way (nlite from nliteos.com). Enhanced mode moves
the interfaces to the PCI space, and WinXP SP1 has a PCI space driver.
It sounds like it is failing, on the first reboot, and perhaps that
is related to the built-in driver.
I've also had problems on the first reboot, when the MBR (Sector zero)
was butchered. That was caused by previously installing Linux, which
installed its own MBR suitable to work with GRUB. (It is also possible to
have an MBR virus, where there is some substitution going on down there,
and the real MBR is offset somewhere and is not actually living in
sector zero any more.)
The Windows "fixmbr" from the recovery console might be one way to fix that.
I think you can specify a drive to fixmbr. If the WinXP installer disc finds
a good signature in the first sector, it won't update the contents,
which is why otherwise, you might not be able to correct by just trying
to install over and over again. The 0x55AA at the end of the first
sector is the signature, and tells an installer that something has already
loaded an MBR. (Installers may honor this, so that boot managers and
multibooting can work.)
fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0
If you knew nothing about Recovery Consoles and the like, you could use
a brain dead recipe, like erasing the whole drive with DBAN, and then
giving it another try. That should zap sector zero. DBAN (dban.org) is dangerous,
because it can erase all drives in the PC at the same time, so disconnect
any backup drives before using it. For that matter, when reinstalling
WinXP, I would disconnect any other drives. I've had enough "splatter"
accidents, to make that a normal part of installing any OS.
I have, since my original experience with my MBR, learned that the first sector
contains.
446 bytes code, 64 bytes holding the four Primary Partitions, 0x55AA
so in fact if you want to work on the MBR, you have to be a little
careful. Fixmbr is probably clever enough, to only zap the 446 byte
part. My own recipe that I used at the time, took out all 512 bytes,
which is only appropriate if you aren't keeping any of the partitions.
So a little care is required while working with sector zero, especially
with someone else's computer.
If you did, somehow, lose the partition table, and the partitions
are still present, they can be scanned for manually using TestDisk.
TestDisk can compute correct values for the partitions, and offer
to correct the 64 byte primary partition table. A human should
still review the values though, to see if they make sense (partitions
correct size, no overlap). If the primary partition entries are already
scrambled, then TestDisk cannot make it worse than it already is.
It is what you use after TestDisk, that makes it worse :-)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
Paul
.
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