Re: Is my hard disc faulty? (Boot failure, missing hal etc)



"HartleysXB@xxxxxxxxx" wrote:

> > Is there anything still connected to the mainboard IDE controller, on the
> > primary or secondary channel?
>
> Until last night the on-board primary IDE channel had nothing plugged
> into it and the secondary had the DVD / DVD-writer.
>
> > If not, are the motherboard IDE controllers still enabled in BIOS? If so,
> > try disabling the controllers that have been replaced by the PCI card.
>
> In my floundering around to find a resolution to problems three weeks
> ago I think I tried this with no joy. However I will give it a whirl in
> the future.

It would be a long shot that this would make a difference. Both would be
using int 14, but if there is no drive connected, that controller should not
be generating interrrupts, unless it has flakey hardware.

> > > Yesterday my PC failed to start. I failed to find something on the hard
> > > disc, it checks the floppy then CD for bootable media then tries the
> > > SCSI (as it refers to the ATA card, finds a boot sector (?), prints
> > > SCSI ... OK and then hangs.

This would tend to indicate a hardware issue, or corruption of a file that
is needed to boot, or an ntfs file system corruption issue. The maxtor diags
will not likely catch the latter two, but running chkdsk /r should.

> > > I have successfully run the Maxtor PowerMax software to
> > > ensure the hard disc is OK, but the only thing I can think of is the
> > > disc is in some way dodgy.
> >
> > It could be. Did you run both the quick check and the full scan?
>
> Only the full scan - I've now run it twice and the disc has passed both
> times.

So the full scan runs on the PCI card but not when connected to the
motherboard controller? This tends to implicate the mainboard IDE controller
as being suspect. If it worked for some number of weeks and then failed, it
would tend to indicate a h/w problem.

The fact that it still seems to work ok with the older 10gb drive tells me
that it is a timing issue - the new drive is too fast for the old controller.
It may have kept up for the few weeks that it worked, but got a little hot or
something trying to keep up and now it can't handle the modern drive.

> Last night I pulled out the disc I'm having trouble with, changed its
> jumpers from cable select to master only, changed the IDE cable and
> tried again. No difference was made. I tried plugging the disc back
> into the motherboard and that failed with "A disk read error occurred."

So the symptoms are a little different when plugged into the mainboard vs
the PCI card? If so, I would limit testing of the new drive to the PCI card
and assume that the mainboard controller is incompatible.

BTW, the IDE controller intelligence resides mainly on the circuit card on
the drive itself. The PCI/mainboard "controller" is little more than a buffer
with limited intelligence.

> What I have now done is dug out an elderly 10Gb drive, plugged that
> into the motherboard, the 200Gb drive back into the ATA controller card
> and installed XP SP2 on the 10 Gb drive. I am now running AVG on the
> system to check the 200Gb drive then I'll try housecall.antivirus.com
> to see if that can spot anything. I'll also do a chkdsk / scandisk from
> within XP on the 200 Gb drive. To see if that can spot something wrong.
> For the hell of it I'll compare the hal.dll on my 200Gb drive with that
> on my 10Gb drive to check they are the same - but I do expect them to
> be.

I find that running chkdsk /r from recovery console tends to fix more
problems and more severe problems than when launching it from XP. I usually
go into RC, run chkdsk /r and after it finishes, type exit to reboot, go back
into RC and do it again until it no longer says that it 'found and fixed one
or more errors' and then run it one more time for good measure.



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