RC1 install makes IDE drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jason
  • Start date Start date
J

Jason

Vista beta2 was unstable on my computer, but at least I managed to get it
installed and running (albeit only by removing all SATA drives and
installing on a blank IDE drive).



Tried the same thing with RC1 today and it went great right up to the
initial logon prompt. I had chosen the high security setting (airport or
whatever). After giving it my password for the first logon, it froze,
eventually rebooted, and now the IDE drive I had installed it on can't get
past my bios post screen!!



Specifically -



-If I power down the computer and power it back on, the bios sees the drive,
and reports it as SMART capable and OK. However after that it says, there
is an error on Primary IDE Master and no hard drive is available.



-If I reboot without powering down, it skips the SMART message and goes
straight to the no HD found error, and the HD light stays on all the time.



This means I can't even load my disk tools and erase the whole drive to
start over! Argh. I've never seen an install of an OS mess up a hard drive
like this, and it rounds out what has been a terrible Vista experience for
me so far.



Anybody have any ideas what might have caused this problem. or more even
more importantly, how I can just erase this drive and re-deploy it towards
something else.



Thanks,



J.



My system is built on an Asus A8V deluxe MB with and AMD Athlon X2
processor. I can give more specs if they might be relevant.
 
I always keep a boot floppy for win 98 handy because you can always format a
drive with that.

Colin
 
Actually you can't since by default Vista installs as NTFS partitions and
win98 boot disks can only read fat..
 
Yes you can, format with FAT. Having done that there many programs for
formatting in NTFS. Or there are many tools that run off floppies that will
format straight away in NTFS. I've done it many times - I'm a computer
engineer looking after over 30 systems in internet cafes
 
Hi Guys,

Thanks for the comments, but this problem is at least a couple steps more
bizarre than that. The issue is that the IDE drive that Vista RC1 failed to
install on can't even make it past the bios post screen any more. If I boot
to a 98 floppy, or other bootalbe set of disk tools, by the time I get a
command prompt the computer doesn't recognize that it has a hard drive on
the primary IDE channel at all!

So far... it's still got me stumped.

J...
 
I thought I was dreaming (having a nightmare?) when something similar
happened to me (TWICE) - primary IDE master not even being recognised by
BIOS after playing with Vista.
I have NO idea what Vista could be doing to cause this, but I fixed the
situation by booting from a disk tool CD - I found that either Acronis
Trueimage or Acronis Disk Director did the trick - others may work too.
Note that I didn't actually have to perform any corrective action - just
boot the CD, notice that all disk partitions are now recognised then reboot
normally.

Regards, Len
 
Well... glad to hear somebody has heard of this. However, sounds like you
were luckier than me. The Acronis tools were actually the first ones I
tried. They couldn't see the drive after the bios choked on it. After
reading your post, I took the desperate step of connecting power to the
drive after the bios posted (at the boot selector menu). Sounds stupid, I
know... but I was out of ideas. This actually did let me into the drive
with Acronis, but deleting the VISTA partition with Disk Director (and even
doing a 1X wipe) failed to fix the problem when posting. Amazingly, I then
found even the Seagate Disc Tools (which can find the drive even without the
radical late power-up) fail when trying to write zeros to the drive. I gave
up at that point... at least for now. Ironically SMART status still seems
ok. Never seen a software program screw a drive up this bad, and would love
to have more of an idea what's going on.

While I'm normally something of a glutton for punishment on these things, I
think unless I figure out how to fix this, I'll declare this computer a
VISTA free zone. Between this and the amount of effort it took to get beta
2 running, I wonder if I could compete with others for worst Vista
experience on a relatively high end computer. Hopefully so!

Thanks,

J...
 
Only my guess: Don't discard hardware failure. First, try by entering
the BIOS to see if the drive is recognized there. You can try to put it
on auto detect again and save the changes. If it doesn't work, clear
cmos data and configure and save the BIOS data again. If none of these
work, change your IDE data wire and check if the master/slave/CS jumper
is set the right way.

It seems a hardware hard disk failure to me :-((

Jason escribió:
 
Well... ok... Fenando was right. Looks like it was amazingly bad timing
for an actual hardware failure, but a hardware failure nontheless. It
probalby had nothing to do with the fact that I was installing RC1 at the
time.

A nearly identical RC1 install on same computerwith an identical Segate
drive worked fine. Of course, original drive sitll won't post.

This is still the first time I've had a hard drive failure that looks like
this (no click of death, no posting, ok SMART status), but I guess there's a
first time for everything.

Thanks for the input.

J...
 
Back
Top