200N sata problems

[smashley]

200N sata problems

[smashley]

I put my 200N together a couple of weeks ago and installed Win XP (from MSDN - just a trial run). It worked fine for the first week, but then it just stopped booting and hung during the WinXP splash screen. Safe mode (or any other rollback) didn't work and showed that the drivers were being loaded up-to-and-including mup.sys.  I'm fairly sure that this isn't significant as mup.sys is the last driver to be loaded anyway.

Windows XP fails to boot up. All attempts to rollback have failed (last good config, safe modes etc).

Attempts to recover or reinstall (from the Win XP CD) fail as the installation process hangs when examining the hard drive (last status message is "Examining 117240 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on viasraid..."). Basically I can't install Windows XP at all now. I tried Win2k Pro but this ends up with a blue screen after taking an age to get going.

The hard drive is working to a degree because the broken installation Windows XP will still attempt to boot to a degree (as I've said, Win XP safe mode shows the drivers being loaded).

This isn't a problem I've been able to find much out about.
If I could pinpoint it to either the HD or the mobo I could do an RMA but until then I'm a bit stuck.

biostar ideq 200N
athlon 2500 xp+ (barton)
2x512 PC3200 TwinMOS 2.5cas
maxtor diamondmax plus 9 sata 120gb
lg dvd writer
mitsumi floppy drive (I replaced the memory card reader after the problem occurred).
Default bios settings (except CDROM boot).

[jester1176]

sounds like your hard drive took a poo.  what i'd do is download maxblast, maxtor's diagnostic utility, and run that to confirm.  write down any code it gives you and call maxtor up.

good luck

[smashley]

Thanks for the advice.

I got Powermax to run (eventually) and the low-level test found a problem and fixed it.
This causes XP to bluescreen during the boot sequence with UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME which nothing can stop.
Does this suggest that the boot sector had been corrupted?

However the repair has broken the existing partitions so the XP repair mode doesn't kick in.
At least I can actually reinstall XP which is a step forwards.