two hdd won't boot

[ivelimirovic]

Hi!

Yesterday I've encountered strange problem. After normal shutdown, I tried to boot up my system, and received "Insert boot disk" message, but only after a long time (5 min). Immediately, I've checked BIOS boot parameters, everything is OK.

Now, I have two operating systems on my machine, XP-SP2 installed on my 400GB RAID strip hard drive (which is the system I normally boot from), and 2003-SP1 Server installed on second SATA drive, both of which worked without any problems. When I tried to swich to boot device to 2003-SP1, I got exactly the same result.

I've booted from several boot cds, with following results:

- hirenBOOT - system boots after long waiting (5 min), Partition Magic couldn't start. NTFSDOS can read the RAID array, data on it seems OK, but it doesn't recognize the SATA drive. chkdsk reported no errors on RAID array
- WindowsPE - it does not recognize any drive
- Linux PE (don't remember which version it is) - recognized SATA drive (but not the RAID), everything seems to be OK
- I've also tried to boot up from windows install cds (both XP and 2003), but they don't seem to recognize drives. On 2003, I've managed to enter recovery console (same thing didn't work on XP) and tried FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, they reported no error, but this didn't fix the problem

My configuration:
Athlon 64 3000
1GB Kingston RAM
Asus KN8-E Deluxe
2x200GB Maxtor DiamondMAX RAID array (strip mode, SI controler)
250GB SATA Maxtor DiamondMAX
Radeon 9800pro
Pioneer DVDRW
XP-SP2 Pro and 2003-SP1 Server

Also, I didn't made any changes to hardware and software recently, and the whole system is on the UPS, so I believe power surge didn't cause the problem...


I put in another (PATA) drive, installed XP-SP2 on it, installed motherboard drivers (didn't bother with video and audio, used default). The new OS can see correctly the RAID array, I can access it, but when I try to copy data, the system stops responding at random intervals.
To put it more clearly:
- when copying one folder, the explorer stops responding after few seconds, so I have to kill it in task manager (copied files work correctly). when i delete copied files and try to do the same thing with the same folder again, explorer stops respondig, but on different file (it copies more or less files).

The amount of copied data is small (averages 100MB), so I'm unable to copy larger files.

The new OS is unable to see SATA drive, while the BIOS detects it. When put in another machine, SATA drive is recognized, it can be accessed, but it reports I/O errors when I try to copy data.

Does anyone has suggestion what to do next? The data on hdd's are really important to me...

Thank you in advance!

 

[Deleted member 24505]

try a differant sata drive,see if the windows you installed on the pata drive will see the sata drive and let you read and write to it.try your single sata drive in another machine see if it works,if it does,the sata controller on the board may have died.if the pata drive works and the test sata one doesnt the only thing it can be is the controller.

 

[ivelimirovic]

thanks, i'll try it this afternoon

 

[Deleted member 24505]

does windows work ok?.as normal apart from the disk problem?.games and stuff run ok?.