hard drive problems.

[saintdragon]

hello, im having some hard drive problems which i have just ran into(im not on the computer i use becuase of the problem), well, i was just playing guild wars, then my computer turnt off, it rebooted, no BSOD, just asked me to put in the windows disc, so i did and tryed to repair it via console, nothing, so i tried to make a new installing of windows, but it said it couldnt find the hard drive, so i went and opened my computer, but to my naked eye couldnt see anything wrong, apart from some wires not put in, but which arnt ever in, i want to know if theres anything wrong, if you want pictures i cant take some photos and upload them prehaps. i just dont want to loose all the stuff on it because its worth more then the hard drive itself.

but i could be mistaken and some wires may be out, but my tired eyes do not see anything, in the mean time i ordered another hard drive, incase anythnig goes wrong and it wont work, but if i dont get any suggestion il see when i get my new hard drive if i can goto my hard drive which i use now, if i cant and it persists not to work then i will send it back and get a new one...

please if you have any suggestions say something and i will try it out!

[ultimate]

Is the drive recognised in the bios, if so is it set to first drive.

[47 65 65 6b]

I assume the drive is the one in your "My system" info? Did you notice it was particularly hot when it crashed? Are there two different types of wires plugged into the back of your HDD (power and sata)? You will probably need some third party sata drivers to do a reinstall of windows, when the blue screen pops up after you put in the windows XP CD, if you read what it says in the grey bar at the bottom of the screen it will say "hit F6 if you need to install third party sata drivers now" shortly after the screen first appears and before it starts loading all that stuff, if you have some third party sata drivers (most likely from your mobo support cd), you can hit F6 when windowsXP prompts you to and install them from the support CD. See if you can go to the recovery console after installing the sata drivers, if so then you can probably save everything if you can get access to your HDD.

Don’t know about your Asus board but AFAIK sata often (not 100% certain about newer boards) has its own BIOS separate from the primary BIOS (it usually shows after the BIOS passes control to WinXP, will probably say something about "Raid" or "Sata" somewhere on that black screen just before windows loading screen appears ( if your HDD was working ) it should also say to press an "F" key (i.e F4 or something) to enter raid controller (or something similar). Just something to bear in mind.

Your safest bet might be to wait until your new HDD arrives, and install winXP from scratch, using the third party sata drivers at winxp setup, then you can sort out getting all the info from your old HDD to your new one and finding out what went wrong.

As long as you don’t put cables in the wrong way around, and whatever you do, you don’t format or unpartition your HDD, having a play about should be fairly safe. If in any doubt about doing something though, and the data is valuable to you, best to play it safe and wait until the new HDD arrives.

Good luck
47

[saintdragon]

heh, thanks for reply's, but works out that the hard drive is dead :-(, i think new one comes tommorow or wednesday, anyway cheers again lads. too bad i lost lots of work, but stuff happens...