Would this have screwed up my boot sector?

[nheather]

Just had to replace a failed motherboard. The replacement is the same make, similar, but not identical.

I knew that my HDD (Windows 7) had been created as Native IDE - out of ignorrance really, that was the default setting on the old board when I installed a few years ago and I didn't know any better to change it.

So when I replaced the board I went into the BIOS and set it to NATIVE IDE. But when I tried booting it just said that no bootable disk was found.

I experimented setting it to AHCI, and this time the disk was detected and started to boot into windows but came up with two option, NORMAL or REPAIR. I tried a normal boot but that quickly just rebooted the PC. Didn't want to try REPAIR just yet.

So I did a bit of reading and found posts suggesting setting it to NATIVE IDE which I had already tried and RAID.

Foolishly I tried RAID, and this started up and then asked for driver disks so I aborted, knowing that wasn't right.

But after that, even when the disk was detected in AHCI it didn't prompt for NORMAL or REPAIR any more. It now prompts to enter bootable media - so it can see the disk but doesn't think it is bootable any more.

In NATIVE IDE it still din't even detect the disk at all.

The failure to detect in NATIVE IDE seemed strabge to me so I swapped the SATA ports around and Bingo! the drive was now detected. However, I now get the same prompt to enter bootable media as I do with AHCI.

I fear that had I swapped the ports originally then it would have booted fine in NATIVE SATA., but since trying RAID it has screwed up the boot sector.

Does that sound plausible. Would selecting RAID, trying to boot, but not provide any drivers midify the boot sector.

If so will going into system repair using the windows disk sort that out? Plan to try anyway, just seeing if there is any advice before I do.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[nheather]

Ignore - found the fault. Forgot I had two hard disks. Only one is showing up is my data disk which isn't bootable. My main disk is toast, dead as a dodo.

Odd that the motherboard and the main HDD died at the same time but that does seem to be what has happened.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[WantoN]

Sorry to hear that but glad you found the fault. This is why I do so much redundancy and backup, hope you didn't lose much.

 

[nheather]

Sorry to hear that but glad you found the fault. This is why I do so much redundancy and backup, hope you didn't lose much.

I was fairly lucky. I'm not that disciplined with backups, but I do have the really mportant stuff backed up. Also on my PC, most of the data is on the disk that didn't fail.

The one that did is my applications though my outlook PST is on there - I have a backup but a few months old.

I've ordered an identical disk so that I can swap the boards over - clutching at straws but the disk was only £18 so worth a punt.

If by miracle the board does work the plan is to quickly get data off it and then the disk as I could never consider it reliable.

Cheers,

Nigel