Anyone ever had a SATA drive just disappear?

[Executioner213]

My comp crashed....restarted on it's own. When it rebooted, it came back up with "Windows could not load because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll
Please Re-install a copy of the above file"

So when I threw my windows disc in and restarted the comp, I tried to do a repair and got lost.

I went in again and tried to just do a clean install, hoping it would just reinstall all the old win files. Come to find out, it all the sudden doesn't detect my SATA hard drive that I had 1 partition for Windows, another partition for files. The drive is not detected at all, not even in the bios. I don't know what the fuck happened.

The setup is similar to one that EtherForBreakfast reccomended in a past thread: AMD Opteron 165 Dual Core/ASUS A8N-E. The SATA drive is a Western Digital Caviar 250GB drive.

Anyone else had a similar problem, or possibly know what is up?

 

[carl@laruso.com]

sata drivers mate......

They probably came with your mobo on the instalation cd, pop it in and install them ~BAM~ you hard drive should re-appear

C

 

[Tachy]

Probably the hard disck have a virtual partition in it, try to see the hard drive with another pc and repair it....

 

[bjp]

should still show up in BIOS though,
is there a refresh button in your BIOS, mine has F3.

 

[Mutant]

The drive is not detected at all, not even in the bios. I don't know what the fuck happened.

Maybe it just died.
How old is the drive ?
Does it spin ? If not check the connectors (turn off your comp first ), disconnect both cables and connect again, replace cables etc.

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

Are you running a RAID0 by chance?

Regardless - you need the SATA driver and it must be on floppy.. When doing the reinstall, press F6 to specify the device. I'm sure you did this originally and just forgot about it. This is an nvidia 410/430 chipset?

Anywho, before doing a whack and reload head into recovery console (press R to enter... NOT REPAIR, but Recovery Console) then at C:\ type:

attrib -H -R -S c:\Boot.ini
DEL C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot

Another option... from c: at rec console with your XP cd in drive, type:
expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll.

this will take the orig hal.dll from cd and expand/extract to your sys32 dir and you should come back up.

As for the sata not showing in bios that COULD be an issue... let me know how you get on, and more importantly, what caused the issue? any triggers or possible reasons?

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

btw - the only WAY you can see that error message about hal.dll missing is if your hd IS detected.... otherwise you'd see OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND, or INVALID BOOT DEVICE, something like that... you would not see a win based err at that point.

lemme know, homie G.

 

[Executioner213]

I'm going to try that as soon as I can, I'm in the process of buying a house (potential recording studio pad!! Wish me luck folks), so I will probably have to put it on the back burner for the moment being. Thanks for the help guys, and especially from Ether...I'm sure you are right on that one.

 

[~Neurotica]

Yepp... I have the same prob. And I'm sure that it's all 'cause of motherboard, maybe SATA controller.
I've upgraded my PC not that long ago. New mb, hd, processor and other stuff. Motherboard ASUS P4P800-X. And I used SATA HD. And during the year it worked so shitty. Slow and I always had probs with system, so I reinstalled my Windows like every 3 months... I thought that I just had bad Windows version. And finally once beautiful day my Windows crashed and I could never install it again as my PC didnt detect my SATA HD (JD). I've decided that it was defected from the start - so thats why I had probs all the time. Ha! I've new SATA HD, even 2 of them. Aaaaaaaaaaand - same shit . They are not detected. I also tried to update BIOS - no result.
So what else can it be? - Motherboard, SATA controller. And when I've switched my old the very first ATA HD - it worked. So now my 2 SATA HD's (160 G and 80 G) are laying and resting in the box and I'm on ATA, that is only 12 G. LOL!

 

[JBroll]

Had that on my laptop while the desktop crashed otherwise (surprisingly, taking down Linux with it as well - what the fuck? Now *that* is quality fuckupsmanship). All I can say is, Vista's slated for business in November and home use in January...

Jeff

 

[Mutant]

A cheap PCI HDD controller is only ~15$ why don't you buy one Neurotica ?

 

[~Neurotica]

A cheap PCI HDD controller is only ~15$ why don't you buy one Neurotica ?

Cause Im sure that in my situation it won't help. I asked ppl about this model of motherboard they said its the worst one I could get by ASUS. It worked bad from the start. And they say that if I will change the controller - it wont help me much. I need to change motherboard.

 

[Mutant]

Cause Im sure that in my situation it won't help. I asked ppl about this model of motherboard they said its the worst one I could get by ASUS. It worked bad from the start. And they say that if I will change the controller - it wont help me much. I need to change motherboard.

???

I have a very cheap 4 or 5 years old noname (probably much crappier than yours) motherboard that supports only dma66 drives, so i had to buy an additional controller for my new 250 GB disk and it works perfectly (2 old HDDs and a DVD recorder are connected to the motherboard).

But if your motherboard's PCI slots are not working then you just need to dump the board and buy a new one.

Or maybe this will work if your ATA drive works ?

 

[~Neurotica]

???

I have a very cheap 4 or 5 years old noname (probably much crappier than yours) motherboard that supports only dma66 drives, so i had to buy an additional controller for my new 250 GB disk and it works perfectly (2 old HDDs and a DVD recorder are connected to the motherboard).

But if your motherboard's PCI slots are not working then you just need to dump the board and buy a new one.

Or maybe this will work if your ATA drive works ?

Yeah, maybe you're right about the controller. I wanted to change it earlier, but they've told me that its not worth it.
Well, I'll try it out. Thank you.