Re: Disk Boot Failure - More information about the problem for you...

(posting from another email address)

The latest development. It's back to intermittent again, and had some
interesting observations last night. I was on my IDE boot, with the
SATA not visible (as it's been for a day or so now). I tried wiggling
around the SATA cable a bit more, to see if anything happened. After a
few minutes (5-10 minutes, probably) sitting there working, suddenly a
message pops up in my lower right hand corner: "Found new hardware:
SATA controlloer" !!!

Out of the blue, this happens. I look in My Computer, and don't see
the drive, probably because it's not initialized. So I shut down,
restart from the IDE again. This time, I see the SATA controller
initialization during boot, AND now I see the SATA drive in My
Computer.

So I shut down again, and reboot, set BIOS to boot from the SATA. And
voila, the SATA is up again. I ran a full HD diagnostic from WD to see
if it found any problems, and left the machine on overnight. This
morning, the diagnostic was done, and found no problems. And the
machine was still up 12 hours later.

Guess this doesn't change anything other than the probability of it
being the hard drive going south is clearly decreasing. Going to the
friend's to mess with cables and drive swaps. Hopefully solution is in
sight.

Rod Speed wrote:
RSS <rsilverst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote

Dunno, since you dont ever see the SATA drive in that config, it
looks more like the install on the IDE drive doesnt actually have
the SATA drivers loaded. You'd expect to see the original sata
drive sometimes when its sometimes visible when you boot off it.

when i first built the system, i tried booting off both drives, and at
that point in time, i always saw all drives, regardless of which
drive i booted off. so this is a change from that point in time.

OK, maybe you havent booted off the IDE enough to have noticed
the fact that the sata is sometimes visible, sometimes not or something.

You shouldnt get an intermittent result with the boot sector and a
bad boot sector should show up in the SMART data for the drive.

for some reason, i was not able to get SMART data for this drive. I am
not that familiar with this analysis, but i downloaded a tool that
should have been able to perform the analysis and it said that my IDE
drives were SMART enabled, but that the SATA drive was not

Thats normal with some SMART utes.

Try Everest
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

- in fact, when i look in hardware lists, only my SATA controller
appears - the drive that runs on that controller is sort of "transparent"
for lack of another word.

Greyed out is the usual way to say it.

See what Everest shows.

I'd check that the sata driver is actually loaded in the
install you boot when booting the IDE drive first myself.
You should be seeing the sata drive intermittently and since
you never see it, its more likely that the driver isnt loaded.

i am not completely following your last paragraph here. i've booted from
the IDE drive a few times now, and i never have seen the SATA driver.
although now that i've gotten to the realm where i can't ever boot from
the SATA, this doesn't surprise me

Yeah, me neither.

- i guess it would have been better if i could have done this 2 days ago
when i still had a 50/50 shot of booting off the SATA drive.

Yep.

if the driver isn't loaded,

I meant it had never been loaded with that install. That possibility
has now been eliminated because you say at the top that you
have seen the sata after having booted the IDE in the past.

what is this indicative of, *other* than that the SATA controller is not
active?

Just that it was never installed, but like I say, you've confirmed
that it was loaded and you could see the sata drive in the past.

Certainly worth trying another sata drive now to see if its seen,
but its more likely to be a bad sata cable since fiddling with that
did see the appearance of the sata drive vary.

It could certainly still be a bad solder joint with the sata
connector on the motherboard, or on the sata drive.

.

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