Boot problem

Delphi91

Ok, I had my pc on the other night (Tuesday) and the mains supply did some weird things. The power in the area went off for a period of 1-2 seconds a number of times ( I was out at the time but had left the pc on). Eventually it went off competely. It was rectified by the ESB in the early hours and when I came back into my home office around 8am the following morning, the pc was on as far as the Windows login screen. I didn't log in, but used the "Shutdown Computer" option on that screen. All seemed to go well.

This evening when I tried to start the machine, I get the following message:

"No drive attached to the Fastrak controller - the BIOS is not available"

I then get the message:

"Reboot and Select proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

At this point it hangs.

Now I know the Fastrak controller is a RAID controller, but I don't have a RAID system set up.

I've tried all sorts of BIOS settings, tweaking them, and rebooting but to no avail. Does anyone have any suggestions??????

Mike

game4it70

hi mike the only thing i can think of is to short the pins on the mobo for the bios for about 10 seconds.then try and boot up then.

Anti

Just reset the cmos as said above, But dont do it that way. REmove the battery ( after the pc is unlpugged ) And leave it for a hour. Then Replace the battery and boot as normal, All should be okay now....Hopefully.

Also run down to your nearest electricial shop and pick up a surge protector. Better safe then sorry.

8T8

Obvious question but are you actually using the Fastrak controller for your hard drives ?

Delphi91

OK, heres an update.

My main drive is an SATA drive, but for some strange reason, the driver which allows the PC to see it has been corrupted or deleted. Hence the reason (I presume) that it doesn't see the drive when the PC boots.

I've just gone down the road of starting a WIndows XP re-install (Not going to do it unless I ABSOLUTELY 110% have to - data loss, etc). I loaded the SATA driver and the installer now sees the drive (all 120GB) of it. It lists it as drive D at the moment. I was also able to gain access to it using the ARS feature in the Windows installation, so at least I know its safe.

Now, how can I get the PC to keep the SATA driver if I cancel the Windows install? If I quit out of the install, and re-boot, the driver is gone and so is access to the disk.

8T8

Okay something doesn't add up here;

If your SATA hard drive is plugged into the Fastrak controller, said controller should display the drive present at bios post or just after when the controller loads it's own bios (software drivers do not come into play at this stage).

After the bios of the Fastrak controller loads it loads the software driver for the controller (if it was used during the Windows install) and then the OS loads.

So is the hard drive detected by the Fastrak controller at bios post or not because what you describe doesn't sound right ?

Delphi91

Ok, panic over!!!!

I went back into the BIOS again for the umpteenth time and when I went in to the section that listed the harddrives, there was the SATA drive! So, it was just a case of setting it as the first hard drive and away it worked.

Many thanks for all the advice and help/tips.

8T8

That's what I was beginning to suspect, disaster averted