Computer will not boot

When we tried to boot my wife's XP Home HP computer, we at first received a screen that said the hard drive was on the verge of failing. We received this screen again and then I went into the setup and noticed that neither of the two installed hard drives were shown in the BIOS. There was a zero in the spaces for the HD capacities.
I then tried to auto recognize the drives but nothing was recognized. I turned it off and tried to restart, but now it is asking for a boot disk.
Since it is unlikely that 2 hard drives failed simultaneously could this problem be caused by a failed hard drive controller? How do you fix this problem? Is the controller part of the motherboard? Can you add a controller board in a PC slot and get the HD's to work again. I would appreciate any info you can give me. Thanks.
The primary controllers for the 2 hard drives showed nothing but the secondary channels with the DVD drive and CD-writer had entries corresponding to what it is on the machine.

 

SATA or IDE (PATA)?

RAID or NO RAID?

Several pages of hard drive controller cards available from Newegg.

I am not familiar with using controller cards so we'll have to wait for someone with more experience than me to offer suggestions in that regard.


I would first investigate the hard drive cable/connections (including the power cables/connections/voltages) before spending money on a controller card. I expect a replacement cable would be much less expensive than a controller card.

Can you hook up each of the hard drives as slaves in another Windows XP computer to see if the data is accessible?

 

I received this screen:
Primary Master Hard Disk S.M.A.R.T. Status Bad
Warning Immediate back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be emminent.

In the Bios I was able to see the 2 drives after I could not see them for a while. If the boot drive is bad, would that make the slave drive inviscible in the Bios?

I also received a message when I hit F10, restore

File ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. Error code is 4

Does any of this mean anything to anyone?

 

Run the manufacturers disk utility to test the drives. I would definitely slave the drives first in another PC and attempt to save any important data before using them any further.

 

Thanks Wiskeyman. I ran the Seagate software and the drive has many bad sectors. The drive is less than 5 years old and is still under warranty. I guess they will send a new one - which is probably refurbished.

 

One thing about Seagate, they don't (or at least 5 years ago didn't) do advance replacement. I had a Seagate HDD once (newly purchased) and just replaced an HDD for a buddy(had it less than a year). I'll never have a Seagate again. When I had my Seagate repaired, I had to send it to Texas, then they sent it to Mexico, was determined unrepairable, sent back to Texas, then back to me. 3 week process.

FYI - Maxtor and Western Digital offer advance replacement and I've never had issues with those drives but knowing they had the service put me at ease.

 

I wish you had written this info yesterday cause this morning I just ordered a new 500GB EIDE Seagate drive from a computer company in FL for $99.00.
The replacement drive that I used for the other computer, about which this thread was written, was a new Western Digital 250GB with a 2 or 3 year warranty.

 

Hopefully this one will be better for ya!!