Hard drive not detected but still boots.

Hi there, My first post and a long one sorry :P

Today I recieved a new dvd bruner which I replaced an old IDE one. The old one was an IDE so i had a bit of trouble moving my 2 hard drives located at the bottom of my case to higher up so I could use up the 3rd sata power connector. My computer is a mess inside so I ended up taking most of it apart to then realise I had 2 spare 4 pin to sata power connectors :embarrassed: .

So I decided to place the hard drives back in usual spots at the bottom of my antec case for air and used the convertor for the burner. I put all back together but had trouble reconnecting the ide cable to the mobo of an MSI P35 Neo2.

The mobo has a wierd IDE connector on the mobo as in its facing sideways instead of upwards so I had a bit of trouble reconnecting the cable back when i had moved the hard drives maybe I bent the pins? I left if in the end as I have no other IDE drives other than my standard DVD drive. ( sorry about this bit just incase it could affect the problem)

Now when i booted up it says Hard drive not found and a message about a windows sys file not found. I then proceed to the bios to check if hard drives are there under boot order and they were. I select my boot drive and get same message but this time it continues as normal and get to windows vista as usual. I can reboot and get in but seem to get the no hard disk message on boot and random NTOSKRNL.EXE.

Edit Error messages : Hard drive not found ( I think this is regarding not using the sata 7 port on a MSI neo 2 p35 so not an issue i guess)
Error at boot: Error message is NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt.



Specs:
E8400
4GB DDR2 800mhz
8800GT
MSI Neo2 p35
2 x SATA Hard drives ( not raid)
1 x DVD RW SATA ( new and works fine)
1 x IDE DVD ( OLD and IDE connector unplugged as i cant connect back to mobo :s will replace with another sata drive maybe)
Antect 300 Case


Sorry if I missed anthing obvious as I did this early morning and have given up for now. Any extra information needed please just ask.

Edit:
Additional information Windows 64 bit , 600 watt coolermaster PSU, ST3400833AS 400GB Seagate® Barracuda® 7200.9 (storage Drive)
SP0812C 80GB Samsung (Old drive sata 1 but I use it for my OS boot.)

Any help would be apprecaited.

What *exactly* is the error message you're seeing?

Oops sorry reading back my post it was a bit useless without that also im using VISTA 64 bit.
I couldnt remeber it at the time but I rebooted to check if all was good and it came back up
First it says No hard disks found -> Then before it would normally boot to windows it says NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt and about having to reinstall or copy file. When this pops up I can't boot into windows at all as I presume its a critical file.

I tried every combination on my computer for the sata ports but still no joy. I have now just went to windows repair using vista disk 64bit and used repair start up. It came back as 1 file repaired, I then proceeded to boot and it did so succesfully. On vista it then started installing some sata stuff :

Installing Device driver software:
ATAPI IHAS120 6 ATA DEVICE (dvd burner)
SAMSUNG SP0812C ATA DEVICE ( boot drive)
ST3400833AS ATA Device ( second drive)

All of which were for SATA devices, Asking for reboot as I type so gonna hopefully it fixes it. BRB I guess.

Sorry again for the lack of info .

Ok it worked fine after reboot when using windows repair option to find any start up errors. I rebooted again after and the NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt came up again :(. I then tried to chkdsk to which it said it found some errors, rebooted but nothing again.

I then tried fix start up errors again using the vista disk and I got this on its report :

Boot sector code for system disk partition is corrupt
Repair action: Boot sector Repair
Result : Completed successfully Error Code 0x0

I got on straight away after this.

I haven't restarted again and wont for a while as I research abit more. Could the Hard drive be dying causing it to corrupt boot?

what hard drives are they ?

ST3400833AS 400GB Seagate® Barracuda® 7200.9 That is my storage Drive.
SP0812C 80GB Samsung This is an old drive but I use it for my OS boot.

Ive been on for a while now nothing wrong when on pc just scared of rebooting incase error happens.

sounds like your drives maybe on the way out, or at least your boot drive.

unfortunately i don't think samsung offer a good warranty on their drives.. but Seagate do. with seagate you can goto their website and download their drive checking software think it's called seatools. running that will tell you the condition of the drives, but i think it only works with seagate/maxtor drives.

also you can sometimes get these kind of problems if your PSU isn't up to scratch, not sure what power rating your PSU is though.

there's also some software for windows called santools smartmon, which will read the info from S.M.A.R.T and cross reference your drive with the manufactures specs etc, to determine the condition of the drives.

hope that might help you along.

Thanks for the reply.

I have a 600w coolermaster which I bought with my 8800gt which required many amps on the 12v. Everything seems to be running fine while I am on windows. I've had the samsung drive in 3 different builds so would be a shame for it to go :p. As I'm all for performance I guess il have to upgrade it if it happens again. Il give those tools you mentioned a go and make sure I back up everything on the Os drive.

Again thanks for the tips.

Might be of some use:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000646.htm

Thanks for the link, I just rebooted and all good so far. I presume I could use the same command shown on that link using the vista disk as most examples are based on xp, bookmarked on other comp and ipod just incase. Thanks for the help guys.