help! SATA hard drive

[KaiineTN]

I formatted my hard drive and am trying to do a fresh Windows install, but it's not booting from or recognizing the hard drive. The Windows installation gets up to the first restart, and then starts over again from scratch. I have tried a few things like resetting CMOS and playing with the boot order and haven't had any luck.

I tried installing the SATA RAID drivers during the initial installation, but that resulted in a blue screen error telling me to check for viruses on my computer, remove newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers, check the hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated, and to run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, then restart.

There is no blue screen error if I don't try to install the drivers, just the restart loop.

When I try to start the computer without the Windows CD in the drive, it gives me this:

CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 14 85 25 A5 59 GUID: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF PXE-E53: No boot filename received

PXE-MOF: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent.

I don't know wtf that means, but according to my friend, it's trying to boot off the LAN here, which doesn't make much sense to me.

[kaharthemad]

check you boot settings. when you went into cmos you inadvertently change its ability to boot from SATA.

As the problem installing. it is quite possible your sata drive is snakeshit. What is the manufacturer of the Hard drive? Ill send you a link for a hard drive tester.

[KaiineTN]

It's not the boot order, I'm not retarded! ;p

All Serial-Ata/SATA labeled things are enabled in the BIOS.

By the way, the mobo is a GA-K8N Pro-SLI from Gigabyte, nVidia chipset. The drive is a Western Digital , WD2000JS.

[kaharthemad]

goto western digital kaiine and down load there hard drive checker. I the MBR sector is dmg'd it can cause what you are going thru.

btw sorry kaiine I work in a school I assume all the teachers are morons till they prove otherwise. Its best to start with low assumptions and work your way up. Its best not to set my aspirations too high. It leaks thru to here.

[KaiineTN]

Where is the hard drive checker download? Not sure what that is, and "hard drive checker" produced no search results.

[KaiineTN]

I have an old drive in there now, what can I do from Windows to make this work? I only want the other drive in there temporarily, to help me get Windows installed and working on the SATA drive. Anything?

[kaharthemad]

hold on Ill get the link...

[kaharthemad]

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp



go there and enter your part number.

you will want the data lifeguard diagnostic tool.

[Harrison]

Also, if there is an onboard RAID function enabled, and you are NOT using a RAID array....disable the RAID chip.

I only have to do this with SATA drives when I make someone's computer.

[kaharthemad]

yeah what he said