Problem with SATA Drive

Hi all,

I built a computer for a friend a little while ago
MSI mobo, 160Gb Maxtor S-ATA.

All was going fine until i got a call from him last night, the machine will not boot, It gives a BSOD with 'Unmountable Boot Volume'.
This happens in safe mode too.
I tried to run the recovery console but it says no drives detected.
The S-ATA is onboard Via VT8237 and I cannot run Powermax on it to check the drive out.
I do not have another mobo here with S-ATA to check the drive on.
Is there anything else I can do to fault find this problem

Many thanks

Spotta

 

When booting up to Win XP you may get a error that reads "Unmountable Boot Volume ". This is probably because your boot.ini file is messed up.

You can boot to the XP cd and when you see the Welcome to setup press the letter R
You will get a dos prompt
Then type "chkdsk /p" without the quotes and hit enter
When that is done type "fixboot" and hit enter
"Y" and enter at the prompt
Then type "exit" and hit enter
The system will now reboot into Windows

If for some reason that don't work for you, you can boot to the recovery console like above and...
Type "chkdsk /r" then enter
When done type "exit" and hit enter.
This will take longer, but the system should boot back into Windows.

 

Spotta

 

Sounds like a corrupt SATA driver.

Boot from the XP cd, hit F6 and load the SATA driver. Then do a repair install.

 

Hi,

I have downloaded a copy of the S-ATA Raid driver from MSI, followed what you said and now, when you press r for repair it does locate the drive, then gives a BSOD while scanning it saying 'Driver Irq not less or equal'
at the bottom it says fault was with viamraid.sys - which is the raid driver.
Should I try and locate another raid driver?

Many thanks

Spotta

 

For anyone with a similar problem, I got it working in the end after downloading some different drivers from Via arena


Spotta

 

AAGGHH!!

Same machine - similar problem!.
After working fine for 9 days, I got another phone call tonight.
I picked the machine up on the way home from work, turned it on and i get the option screen for restart normally, safe mode etc and no matter what option I choose I get a BSOD saying
'STOP: c0000218 unknown hard error
unknown hard error'
That's it - that's all it says.
I have managed to find these two MS KB articles
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314874
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545

I am going to leave trying out the steps outlined in the second article until the morning, but has anyone ever heard of this before?

Many thanks

Spotta

 

Well I think you have the same problem I have. I was getting the same BSOD and finally discovered it was a bad RAID controller.
Mine was the onboard Promise RAID controller.

 

Hi.

I have managed to borrow a friends Abit NF7-S system to check the hard drive on, and powermax came back saying there was a problem - which I let it fix. I then went on holiday while it carried out a low level format!! and re-checked the drive which it passed. I am currently reinstalling all the software but I still don't know what actually caused this problem.
do you still think it could be the onboard S-ATA?
I would like to know the cause before giving him his machine back

Many thanks

Spotta

 

Can't be sure, but there is a good chance. I've got limited experience with Promise controllers, but I know that there are a couple of XP service patches that have tried to overwrite or replace Highpoint RAID drivers. Wish I could be more specific but I never isolated the exact problem - restored from image backups because I got lazy and needed a quick fix. In as much as this fixed the problems I encountered (three different but similar systems) I always felt it was native XP drivers trying to take control of non- approved third party drivers. Device Manager bore this out too and wouldn't let me put back my original drivers. Correction - let me put them back but then would overwrite again. Just didn't have the luxury of time to fix any other way so restored from earlier images and put all the data back from auto backup on another HDD. Have also run into this with 2000 Server but slightly different problem focused on secondary IDE channel on Highpoint controller not reading two drives - would only recognize one of two regardless of configuration or jumpering. Some FAQ's re: this one focused on power but at 600Watt PSU's again, I think it was controller related. Used Windows 2K Server to mirror drives instead of Highpoint and haven't had any problems since but am limited to 3 HDD's running on the RAID headers (now running the 4th off of normal IDE header - two similar systems with this problem & Win2K). All run fine but that doesn't mean the ultimate problem was ever resolved - believe it is controller related in all instances.