HELP! Windows Setup killing my hard drives! :(

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

Associate
Joined
24 Feb 2004
Posts
1,083
Location
Leeds/Cyprus
OK, about a month after buying all the different bits of kit I finally get time to set up my new rig. I transfer the power supply (Antec HE 500W), DVD drive and both hard disks (1 180GB Hitachi Deskstar IDE, 1 250GB Maxtor SATA) from the old rig over to the new, stick a Windows CD slipstreamed with SP2 and the latest update back from RyanVM's page and fire things up.

(The system is a Gigabyte DS3 with an E2180 and a Radeon 3850)

First installation attempt I notice something a little strange when I see about 44GB of my IDE drive showing up as unpartitioned space. I have no idea why (the drive is not only fully-partitioned but pretty full as well), so I just continue and install Windows on the 1st partition of the SATA drive (as I intended to do anyway, since ithas the most free space).

After copying files over it reboots to continue setup from the HDD, but before booting up it runs chkdsk and finds LOADS of errors! I did not notice on which partition or even on which of the two drives, I was in the kitchen and walked in halfway through it repairing a whole bunch of lost file fragments or something. The error messages were in fact scrolling by so fast they were too blurry to read, but the last message caused my toes to curl up in horror so I remember it: "Boot sector 2 cannot be written"

When finally setup finishes, I notice that, indeed, the last partition on my IDE drive (a 60GB compressed NTFS partition) is missing. Not showing up in Explorer, though I suspected if I brought up Disk Management it would show up as unpartitioned space. I go ahead an open control panel to test out the theory, but every applet I try to launch brings up an error message, which I unfortunately didn't note down, and doesn't run.

OK, I think, either the Windows installation CD was corrupted, or having both hard drives connected during the installation somehow resulted in a corrupt install, and I conclude that the best thing to do was to try reinstalling Windows with ONLY the SATA drive connected. I disconnect the IDE Deskstar and try again. Setup starts copying files over, but halfway through brings up an error message "Cannot copy file something.sys" (stupidly didn't note down the file name either), and gives me the option to retry (which I do, to no avail), ignore the file and continue, or exit setup.

Thinking that my installation medium MUST be corrupted, I exit and try again, this time with an older installation CD (onewith only SP2 slipstreamed on it, assuming the one I made recently with the latest updates was corrpted).

Setup starts, loads, and brings up a message "no hard drives detected. Press F3 to exit setup." At this point I'm understandably laying down some brickwork in terror. I reboot, enter BIOS setup, confirm that the hard drive DOES show up in the BIOS, try Windows Setup again, and get the same error. I try the newer installation CD just in case the old one is FUBAR and the same thing happens.

I then start fiddling with it, checking that the cables are in, trying a new SATA cable, trying it on a different SATA port on the mobo, trying with the SATA controller settings set to "native" instead of "legasy" in the BIOS setup, testing each and every time and not getting any results at all. Eventually, after the umpteenth attempt, and after I had gotten the hard drive to not only be undetectable by Windows Setup but to briefly disappear from the BIOS as well, something gives and Windows Setup sees it! I select the first partition, it starts checking it, and eventually tells me "Windows has repaired errors on your drive. You must restart your computer to continue setup." I do just that, it starts set up again, detects the drive successfully, I pick the partition, it starts checking the drive, and, after what seemed like an eternity, tells me "Windows has detected that this partition is corrupted and cannot be repaired. Press F3 to exit setup".

What happened? Help?? WTF???
 
Yup had same thing happen with a 60GB drive, working fine one day, then windows locked up, reset the PC and it ran chkdsk and found thousands of errors, wouldn't get into windows at all, so went to reinstall only detected the drive as 30GB...

Ran the manufacturers drive util and basically the drive was fubar.

EDIT - Just read about it doing the same thing to annother drive as well... that is odd...
 
Well, the partition that disappeared was from the IDE drive, and then the "cannot be repaired message" was about the SATA drive, and the IDE drive wasn't even connected at all! I refuse to believe that both drives went at the exact same time, when they were working fine yesterday afternoon! This is something to do with either Windows Setup, or, more likely, my motherboard - something about which ports I plugged the SATA drive into, or the precise BIOS settings.

Recovering my data and my drives would be nice, but what I DESPERATELY want to know is WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED? I don't want to go out and buy a new drive to have it happen again!

One last thing I didn't mention was that, due to there only being one IDE port, the Deskstar HDD and DVD were both connected to it (only during the initial setup attempt of course). I'm pretty sure I remembered to correctly set up the HDD was as master and the DVD as slave. Is there any way this could've cause the last partition to disappear, or the SATA drive to fail later on?
 
The gigabyte/jmicron controller that controls the ide channel and purple sata ports gave me no end of problems burning discs until I got rid of the drivers for it. However if your sata drive does not work on the orange ports either this is no help to you.
 
so you suggest I retry on the orange ports? i'm pretty sure I tried both already, switching over several times so that I don't remember on what port I got the "drive corrupt" error and on what port it couldn't see the drive at all - would data corruption caused while I had it on the purple port be permanent, or will it read the drive just fine if I move it back?

just checked and it's on a purple port now - this was what I moved it to before the last installation attempt, in which windows setup repaired lots of errors, rebooted itself, and then said the drive was corrupt and couldn't be repaired. I therefore assume I had it on the yellow ports before,when it showed up in the bios but couldn't be detected by xp setup.
 
I wouldn't use the purple ports in any case.

I've heard that changing AHCI modes etc in the bios can cause corruption in an established partition but have no first hand knowledge of this.

If you can't do a clean windows install using the orange sata ports, with all sata bios options at default on reformatted partition, then you must have a hardware problem. You can rule out the hd and sata cable by testing them on another system. That's all I can say for sure.
 
ive only ever had to change the ahci + raid settings of a mobo's sata controller at work where HP **** their mobo's settings to try and make them less workable. SAS drives + in a mode so that bios detects but no windows setup FTL lol.

I haven't heard about changing them mucking up existing partitions but i havent looked into this as its allways a complete format when ive done it.

Had windows set up say it cant copuy a file as well, chage cd's and it copies it, then fails on another file, sap back and it gets that file etc etc 2 hours later windows is installed.....stupid laptops.....
 
That's not encouraging,so do you reckon it's Windows, the SATA controller, or the drives? Is it possible I have a faulty mobo? and if yes how do I test it apart from trying drive after drive on it?

So is the controller that handles the IDE and purple sata ports on the ds3 universally acknowledged to be faulty? If that's the case i'm a little disappointed in ocuk that nobody told me this was the case when I posted to ask whether to get this or the Abit.... And is there a workaround, apart from only using SATA devices?
 
BTW, I tried theIDE drive in my old rig and it won't boot up ("error reading from the selected boot device" or words to that effect) so putting it in the new rig DID cause data corruption, it wasn't just a matter of it not being able to see one partition. It's very strange though as I didn't try to install Windows on that drive (all my attempts were to install it on the SATA drive) and I didn't try to write anything on it after setup finished either!

I hope it's recoverable though atm I'm more concerned about the new rig not destroying any other HDDs I put in it...
 
Just an update, I ran Memtest86 and it came up with loads of errors, so I assume all that data corruption was caused by faulty RAM. I'm now testing 1 stick at a time to find the faulty ones. Thanks to everyone who tried to help me!
 
Glad you seem to have located your problem.

Just to clarify on the gigabyte/jmicron controller it seems to be working fine for my ide burner with generic windows ide controller drivers, but with the jmicron ones on gigabyte's site or the installation disc it would intermittently fail to burn, and caused my IDE dvd to show up in device manager as an SCSI device! Never tried a hard drive on it though, and glad I only used the orange SATA ports. Probably not related to your problem but worth bearing in mind anyway.
 
That's pretty weird right there... were you using the latest jmicron drivers? Is it possible you downloaded the ones for a motherboard revision different than yours? (Just ideas, I don't even know if the drivers for different revisions on the DS3 are different - could all be the same drivers) Which revision DO you have anyway? I'm on the 1.0. (GA-P35-DS3R, just to clarify, not the 965 version.) And which BIOS revision are you on?

I bought a SATA burner yesterday (along with a new SATA HDD on which I managed to install WIndows just fine today), but I would like to keep my old IDE drive as well. It feels safer having two separate drives on two separate controllers, though it didn't do me much good in this instance, so I WOULD like to be able to use the IDE port on the mobo... For the moment I won't install Gigabyte's drivers since that seems to be working for you, but I'm willing to test my old SATA drive on the purple ports since it doesn't have any critical data on it if you want to try out some stuff to solve your problem.

BTW, while I'm here and people are reading, what's the best data recovery program available? As soon as I install drivers and whatnot on the new HDD I'm gonna try and resurrect my old drives!
 
Yeah, the intel drivers control the yellow ports and work fine for me.

My mobo is the P35C-DS3R, only major difference I think is the ddr3 slots. I'm on the latest version of the bios from gigabyte website, think its 1.9 or something. I tried everything to get my ide dvdrw (pioneer112, so decent one) working properly including flashing the drive's firmware and updating all the mobo chipset drivers to the latest ones on gigabyte site but the only thing that worked was getting rid of the jmicron driver and using the generic windows ide one instead. I'm not bothered about changing anything further, its working fine at the moment, and don't need the extra purple ports.

One thing I particularly didn't like with the jmicron driver was that windows device manager saw my ide drive as an SCSI device. I read somewhere else that this was a "feature" rather than a fault. Go figure.

Glad everything installing ok for you now. If my experience is anything to go by your ide ports should work fine without the jmicron driver, but no harm experimenting. Good luck with the data recovery, can't recommend any software for this as I've never used any.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom