[kushty]

Hi,
My wife has a PC with 2 SATA drives and it has been working fine for about 3 years. Now, when we came to boot it up it would start to load windows the screen would go dark nothing else would happen. We rebooted pressed the Tab key and got a screen with the boot settings in we didn't alter anything in that just exited and rebooted. Now it doesn't even try to boot windows. We can't get the boot screen back by pressing the Tab key. It just goes to another screen saying. VIA Technologies, Inc VIA VT8237 Serial ATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility V2.01

Scan Devices, Please wait....
Press <Tab> key into user window!

Hardware initiate failed, Please check device!!!
The BIOS does not be installed. Press <g> to continue!

When we do that we get the first screen we get when we boot up saying:
Press DEL to enter setup
Press <F8> for BBS POPUP
then it lists the controllers
then lists
Auto detecting Sec Master...ATAPI CD-ROM
Sec Master: SONY DVD RW DW_U14A 1.0d
ULTRA DMA Mode -2
Auto Detecting USB Mass Storage devices..
00 USB Mass storage devices found and configured.

NO Hard Disk Drive Detected.
Press F1 to resume.

When we select F8 we get a choice of the DVD drive or the floppy drive.

I hope I have explained well enough and hope someone can help. Thanks

Steve

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. It is possible the primary hard drive died (your boot hard drive c:). Access the bios and change to boot order to boot from cd drive first. Then boot to a bootable cd, like your windows install cd. You could try running the hard drive manufacurer's diagnostics program on the hd. There are links ot most hard drive manufacurer's diagnostics here http://forums.pcper....isplay.php?f=40. See the sticky post at the top of the forum. You could also try a repair install. See the guide at http://www.geekstogo...ws_XP-t138.html

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. It is possible the primary hard drive died (your boot hard drive c:). Access the bios and change to boot order to boot from cd drive first. Then boot to a bootable cd, like your windows install cd. You could try running the hard drive manufacurer's diagnostics program on the hd. There are links ot most hard drive manufacurer's diagnostics here http://forums.pcper....isplay.php?f=40. See the sticky post at the top of the forum. You could also try a repair install. See the guide at http://www.geekstogo...ws_XP-t138.html

[kushty]

No need to reply, it turned out to be a bad 2nd hard drive. It was making a ticking noise when I disconnected it the pc booted up ok.

Steve