Re: Won't boot from SATA drives

Tony MS wrote:


If I leave the XP CD in, it simply restarts the XP installation process afresh. If I take it out, the system hangs after "Verifying DMI pool data". Yes, tried many times with both SATA HDs

Also, if I try a floppy boot disk, with the correct SATA driver renamed as NTBOOTDD.SYS, and modified BOOT.INI, it displays that it cannot recognise the HD.

Regards

Tony MS


Something you might try at this point, is downloading Knoppix (knopper.net)
or Ubuntu (ubuntu.com), and booting the computer with that. Both of those
Linux OSes can boot from a CD, without needing a hard drive.

The objective in that case, would be to see whether you can access the hard
drive or not. Both OSes should have an option to install their software to
the hard drive on request.

While you have that OS running from the CD, you can also erase the beginning
of the hard drive. Open a command terminal window in Linux, and try something
like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=10000

The only tricky part of the command, is verifying the disk is at /dev/hda
or whatever.

What a command like that does, is erase the beginning of the hard drive.
I have had to do that on occasion, to be able to install an OS on a hard
drive. Some OSes do not like to find the remnants of the work that other
OSes have done, while installing. Clearing off the first few megabytes
of the disk, should blow away any structures at the beginning of the
disk. Naturally, don't use that "dd" or disk dump command, if
important drives containing data are still connected. To use
such a command, make sure that only your Linux boot CD is present,
and the single drive you are attempting to fix.

If attempts to do things to the disk are failing, it should then
be more obvious while using Ubuntu or Knoppix, that you have a
hardware problem. For determining hardware health, an alternate
environment is a handy thing to have. Both distros are a 700MB
download, in the form of an ISO file, and you burn that to a
CD using Nero or the like.

Paul
.

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