XP Can no longer read SATA drive 1

[roycrom]

Hi,

A couple of days ago I decided to reinstall windows on my PC. I dual boot from my first hard drive (80Gb IDE) but I also have a 160Gb SATA drive divided into three NTFS partitions.

First of all I tried booting with my XP CD but that hung immediately after the "setup is inspecting...", I finally traced this down to having APIC enabled in my BIOS. I disabled this.

Unfortunately, I had followed someones advice on some forum first, which stated that I should boot into linux and then delete my Windows partition first. So I had done this and used the linux fdsik facility to delete the first partition.

The hang still occurred - so back into linux and eventually I finally got through to the install but because I already had three partitions for Linux, Windows would not create new partition - back into linux, create the partition and format it with NTFS, re-order the partition table so Windows NTFS partition is seen first (AS stoopid M$ HAS to use C drive).

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I now have brand new install of windows, booting fine with Linux again - however, my SATA drive(Which I can still mount and read fine in Linux) just looks like any old drive in "My Computer" however when I try to access it (it only shows up once instead of 3 times for the 3 partitions) it says incorrect parameter and wont open and disk manager just has a small red X over it.

Now, when I repartitioned I had to delete my swap partition for linux, and then once windows reinstalled I remade it but slightly less and added an vfat partition for r/w access from both linux and Windows, this then became the E drive and I am sure that I used to have the CD drive assigned to R: and now it is D: originally in windows I had the three partitions set up as d: e:, and f: could the fact that these are no longer able to be assigned the same letter could be the reason that I can no longer read that disk or does it sound like the disk label on the SATA has become stuffed somehow?

That Drive has all my media files and I really cannot afford to lose them, I know I can still access from Linux but as the disk is formatted in NTFS I only have read access so can not manipulate the data and can't afford another drive to move stuff around.

Any pointers as to how I may get the disk seen properly again under windows would be most appreciated.

Thanks

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom

 

[PRPhx]

First off, you can install XP to ANY partition. I've had it on Drive F: before. Second, in order to use your SATA drive with XP, you need to install the SATA drivers while installing XP. You do this by pressing the F6 key during installation. You will see a message at the bottom asking you if you want to install any other SCSI devices. Make sure you have the drivers loaded on a floppy disk. Start the install, press F6 and follow the directions.

 

[roycrom]

Yes I know, you can install it any other partition but it can get messy, some programs won't let you change default install location and will only accept "C:\Program file...."

I also installed windows on the IDE ATA drive... I installed my SATA drivers through the VIA hyperion 4-in-1 drivers after XP was installed. My previous windowsThis is what I did last time (No internal or USB floppy drive or PEN Drive or I would have installed to the SATA initially).

I appreciate the reply, maybe I didn't explain too well

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom

 

[kmcferrin]

You are not required to install SATA controller drivers using the F6 "mass storage drivers setup" at the time that Windows is installed. You would only have to install the SATA driver via F6 if you were installing Windows onto the SATA disk drive itself. In this case where the OP was installing Windows on an IDE disk, but was wanting to have access to the SATA disk, you could install the SATA drivers at any time after the OS was installed. I have done this several times when migrating a PC from a PATA hard disk to a pair of SATA disks connected via a RAID controller, and it has worked every time.

 

[PRPhx]

In my case (maybe my mb is just a bit older), my SATA drive would NOT work w/o the drivers being loaded at OS install time. This includes a system rebuild just recently.

 

[kmcferrin]

Interesting. Windows should treat it as it would any other hardware device and drivers. As long as windows doesn't need the SATA hardware to boot and run, you should be able to add it after the fact and then set the boot sequence in the BIOS setup later.

 

[wolluf]

roycrom

got a bit confused with your description of resetting up linux swap and vfat partitions - did either of these operations involve the SATA drive? If they did, then would suspect you've 'corrupted' its partition table (at least as far as XP is concerned). If not, wondering if you've actually got SATA drivers loaded properly in XP. Do they appear correctly in device manager (and do both drives appear in device manager)?

Is the red cross in disk management? (run diskmgmt.msc)?

 

[roycrom]

Hi Wolluf, none of the operations involved the SATA drive(I have three NTFS partitions on there, which are still mountable under Linux), and yes the red cross is appearing on the SATA drive in disk management. Both drives appear in device manager. Curiously, even though I have loaded the VIA drivers, both ATA and SATA show that they are using the same driver... strange... however, I couldn't see the drive at all before I installed the VIA drivers. The drivers are C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\disk.sys and C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\PartMgr.sys

However, I still suspect that SOMEHOW my partition table on the SATA has become corrupted. Only thing I can think of is I typed some grub command wrong in Linux... I don't think I did though.

I know I can use the drive with drivers loaded after I've done the install, as I have never used floppy drivers and F6 on this box. On my last install they were loaded at a later date.

I have downloaded a couple of freeware progs, but unfortunately, these didn't deal with SATA drives. Does anybody know of any freeware/open source utils to fix the partition table on a SATA drive?

Thanks for all the responses so far... still waiting to give out that elusive star though!!

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom

 

[wolluf]

You could try running the SATA drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility - most have one, and they can usually fix some problems.

Partition Magic might be able to fix this (if you had a copy) - its fixed a couple of corruptions I've had.

If you boot into recovery console, can you see the SATA drive at all? If you can, you could try running fixmbr on it (need to supply device name in the right format). If the problem is with the mbr and NOT the partition table, this might fix it.

I have played with editing the mbr (directly - there's a resource kit tool, whose name escapes me currently!) and using

http://www.boot-us.com's

utility to backup track0 - edit that with a hex editor and then restore it. But you need a reference document so you know where the partition table is in the mbr and what values should be present for the ntfs partitions (which is very difficult if you haven't got these from before the problem started!)

 

[roycrom]

Thanks for all the tips Wolluf, I am going to be away from my system for a few days so when I get back to it I am going to get it working again.

When I have the solution I will post here.

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom