sata hard drive question

[neon]

Hello everyone, looking for a bit of help, I have a dell dimension pc its a member of staffs home pc, they are unable to load anything on the pc, boots to desktop but nothing loads there after, nothing can be installed, same in safe mode, i have tried booting into a windows disk and doing a repair instal however the hard drive is not found... I remember a little while ago a post about booting and having a sata hard drive? Can someone please advise me on the problem or how to conduct a fresh install please?

 

Many thanks

[LeMarchand]

In the BIOS, there's normally an option to change the SATA mode; try "Compatibility".

[Mako]

I've found with a recent batch of machines that imaging or even booting from CD was impossible with SATA drives in their default state. You could try entering the BIOS and check what state the system sees the drive. If the BIOS is decent enough, you should be able to change the hard drive from SATA to Native IDE, or something along those lines to an older type, to make the system use legacy controllers and believe it's an IDE Drive, then boot from a CD.

 

Give that a try first. If that works, and you can see the drive - fantastic. If not then there must be a controller issue, or other fault, on the hard drive.

 

It's perhaps worth noting that my PC at home uses a 500GB SATA hard drive that recently started producing similar symptoms. Booted fine, then just crashed after loading the desktop. Nothing would load and it would eventually grind to a halt. Like you, forcing a reboot meant it couldn't find the HDD, and after;

1) Removing the power and SATA cable from the HDD

2) Rebooting the machine, until "Insert Boot media" message appeared

3) Reconnecting the HDD

4) Rebooting again

 

It would see it and work fine. You could attempt that procedure. After a few days of checkdisks and defrags it seems to have stopped, although Event Viewer was filled with Controller Errors in disk0. It may be just coincidence and completely unrelated, but you could try that also.

[neon]

ok well, have just attained a new hard drive, stuck that in and it isnt recognized, expected due to being sata, there are no options in the bios for compatibility or native ide modes, have also tried 3rd party drivers and get unexpected error at line 5. Think I will have to create a boot disk with drivers included? Has anyone done this before?