help - win xp pro problem!!

studiomga

Computer: Asus Asus A7N8X Deluxe/GD mainboard Rev 2.0, AMD2500+ xp, 1G Ram, 2 x 80gb SATA hard drives

Was updating my bios yesterday, all seemed to go ok. Now my computer won't start windows! The computer goes through the traditional start up procedure, the voice says its starting operating system, but nothing happens. It just seems to be waiting to boot from a CD or floppy.

Is it possible that the drivers required to recognise my SATA may have been deleted during update. I know when I first installed the OS I had to install additional drivers for the computer to recognise the hard drives.

Thanks in advance

BigEejit

Was it going ok yesterday after you updated bios? ... you may need to clear cmos and reset all settings in the bios ...

Winters

Originally posted by studiomga
the voice says its starting operating system

Explain more ... my PC tells me nothing


Did you restart it OK after installing the bios updates? The problem may be due to the bios upgrade, I'd advise possibly as BigEejit said, clear the CMOS and start over. BUT do stck in the Windows CD and try and boot from that just to check that the update didnt mess up Widows boot settings.

ALSO make sure its booting from the SATA drives in the bios. It may just not be looking for those when trying to boot.... just thought of that now.

jozi

have same mobo as you, had loads of trouble getting my sata hd to work!!

in bios set boot device (something like that) to scsi, thats how i have it and it boots no problem.

worth a try

jozi

Ryaner

I had the exact same problem as you when I had that board. The thing dont boot no more at all (bad ram I think caused it but havent had time to check)

Anyway the method I was given from support was
1. Clear the cmos by plugging out, crossing the jumper and removing the bat.
2. Boot into bios first time, load setup defaults
3. Config the bios for your setup, disabling any onboard stuff you dont use and an not oc cpu to start with. For sata setup first boot drive to scsi as jozi said.

If that dont work your back to trying windows boot disk etc. Also if you have raid on, the bios update fecks all of that up.

studiomga

Thanks for all the advice - I'm sure the solution is in there somewhere. I actually dropped my comp into a computer shop for them to sort it yesterday evening, because I thought I had done something out of my depth to the hard drives, and I've got stuff on the hard drive that I can't afford to lose.

Thanks again for the help - at least now I know the shop can't suggest some extreme solutions like reinstalling the OS.

studiomga

Ryaner,

I think you've got it there. The raid was on, so that's probably whats happened.

studiomga

OK guys - the shop has tried everything to get my windows working or even access my harddrives. No success!! I am in need of some serious help here - they want to send the sata drives away to Recovery specialists in the UK which is going to cost me thousands!! I am a student, I have 5 months work of my thesis on these hard drives (CAD work, images etc.) and I really need help to recover my work.

They have seem to have tried all of the above suggestions. They added their own hard disk with windows installed and tried to access my sata drives from there, but no success. The drives seem to be 'unpartitioned' and they are not able to open them.

So if there is somebody out there who thinks they can fix this problem, I would really appreciate it. I just want get my files back and will reinstall my windows again after if neccessary.........

BigEejit

If youre drives were set up as raid (not mirroring) the os would have formatted them together, i.e. you cannot read data off one, you must have the pair working as a raid group ... also you must have the drives in the right order ... the drives have to be wired the same as they were before

Did you try going back to the bios level that you were at before updating? check up on this course of action before doing it, there may be problems going down bios levels on some boards.

Dont panic, if you havent formatted those drives then the data is still on them

Ryaner

Ok thats nasty. I've heard of raid repair wizard where they boot to dos on a disk and rebuild the array. Try google fror something. I dont know if the on board chip has something.
I'd suggest you ghost the two drives to images before doing anything like that incase it writes to the drive.

studiomga

Thanks for the advice lads. But I think I'm a little out of depth to solve this problem.

Would anybody be interested in helping me and I can pay whatever the going rate is?

Ryaner

What make and model are the drives and I'll see what I can dig up for you

zAbbo

Sorry to hear about this, but i cant believe you didnt back anything up, not even on the college network.

Hope it all works out

studiomga

2 x Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB S-ATA
S-ATA/150 8MB cache 7200RPM

I know the information is on them, so I suppose it really trying to find a way of accessing them, without knowing the partition code.

Ryaner

Ok firstly how do you have three sata drives on the board? It only has two sata slots onboard?
As for the array, it's raid1 I presume yes?

studiomga

I have a program on the maxtor website - Maxblast 3

"MaxBlast 3 is a one-step, ATA/IDE hard drive installation utility. MaxBlast 3 makes hard drive installations and upgrades hassle-free for novices and professionals alike by automatically identifying, partitioning, and formatting any IDE hard drive, making it data-ready in about one minute.

This version of MaxBlast is used on systems with already existing Windows installations to copy all your data to the new hard drive in order to use it as a boot drive, or additional storage drive. If you're building a new system, the MaxBlast bootable floppy or CD versions are recommended."

If I buy another harddrive, install windows on it, would this program help me in any way?

Ryaner

No that wont recover the data at all.
Check out the software on this site ok. There is a demo and it might work for you

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

If you get no joy from it post and I'll look a get the program I saw before.

studiomga

Ya, just 2 Sata drives...... but in RAID 0 (striping) array. The hard drive was a normal hard drive the shop put in just to get into windows. I don't have that drive in my machine anymore, so maybe I need to buy a drive to install windows on.

I 'll have a look at that program
Thanks for the advice Ryaner

studiomga

Do I need to purchase another harddrive, install windows etc. in order to run these recovery applications?? Also it was mentioned earlier that I should ghost the drives to images. How would go about this?

Ryaner

Some do run off cd's I will have a look now and see what I can find for you ok

studiomga

Purchased the software (rrt studio 2) recommended earlier:

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

Cost me 80 bucks, but it allowed me to recover all the files to another hard drive...... thanks for all the advice

studiomga

Ryaner

Glad to see you got it sorted. Didnt exactly look at the demo but thought it would be enough.
Data must have been worth a fair bit to you to spend that.