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win xp setup does not detect hard drive


jorvik

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i have been reading through your old thread on driver installation with intel products. i think i may be experiencing a similar issue, but given the age of the old thread and the different hardware, i thought a new thread might be more appropriate.

briefly, i have a home built win xp pro, with sp 3, computer with an aus p5p800 mother board. i have 2 western digital sata drives connected in a raid 0 configuraation, using an adaptec serial ata raid controller 1210sa. computer was running well for about 7 years, and no new hardware or software has been installed for many months. around 1 month ago, i began to experience crashes to desktop, initially random, sometimes when the computer powered up but not used. most of the crashes have been attributed in the minidump files to hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe. the computer boots up in safemode without any difficulty, and whatever loads up appears to work fine. no crashes to desktop in safemode, even when computer left powered up for 12 or more hours. in normal bootup mode, the crashes occur regularly, usually within minutes of windows opening completely, even when start up items have been reduced to a minimum using msconfig.

i have done the following hardware checks. checkdsk has been run twice, and no problems found. i have 2 x1 gb of ram, and several tests with ms memory test and with memtest86+ have shown no problems. win xp sytem file checker, using my original win xp setup disc, ran to completion and reported no corrupted or missing files.

here is the relevant bit which brought me to this forum. at this point, i began to think about reinstalling win xp or at least doing and repair-install. i have made about 5-6 attempts to do the repair install, using my original xp professional setup disc. i had to do this in safemode, because in normal mode , thje crashes occur before i can boot up the set up disc. in safe mode, i can get the setup disc to begin the process, and everything goes well for the first couple of steps when the files and drivers are loading. when te "welcome to setup" screen opens, i select the 1st option and then there is a message "win Xp setup does not detect a hard drive". After a number of tries, i realized that just before this message appears, there is a single line message at the bottom of the screen which i think says something like 'if you need to load drivers for a raid or scsi drive, hit f6". i have not tried to hit f6 because i am totally unsure how i would proceed afterwards and i did not want to do anything which might mess up my raid set up.

i don't know where to go from here. even if i chose to do a complte new installation of win xp ( which i am still hoping to avoid), i am not sure whether i will run into the same ?driver problem as i may be dealing with for the reinstall, since i am using the same setup disc from microsoft. i have read about nlite and scrolled through the earlier thread dealing with drivers and win xp installations. i am not sure i really understand whether doing any of these things will likely solve my problem. i am not sure whether i need to slipstream some additional files or whehter there is another approach. i actually have a working floppy drive on the computer,, so using it in addition to a cd is possible.

i apologize for the length of this note, but will be truly grateful for any help or suggestions.

jorvik

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You could began by posting the mini dumps and configuring XP in safe mode to create a full kernel dump (that you'll need to compress and upload somewhere and post a link to this "somewhere").

This way we might help you repair the current XP install.

The next step might be to check you hard drives with data lifeguard diagnostics. For this step, you might need to connect the hard drives to the motherboard but as it might damage your raid 0 (if it find errors and try to fix them), you should create a full backup of everything on the raid 0 before (for example with Acronis true image but you could use clonezilla). Do not install acronis on this computer but generate the media rescue and boot with it (it should allow you to create a partition backup).

Also, don't forget that raid 0 doesn't support fault tolerance and that the adaptec 1210a is a software based raid controller (so both acronis and clonezilla might see both hard drives but not the right partition). And in this case, you'll need to backup the data from safe mode manually or with robocopy (from the windows 2003 resource kit).

Edited by allen2
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hi allen:

many, many thanks for your quick reply. after reading through it and looking at the sites you mention, i am pretty sure that i am already in above my level of competence, and that , if i proceed further then i will have no idea whatsoever what i am doing.

i was hoping that you might be able to give me some simple guidance into the question of the win xp repair-install and the issue of loading up the raid drivers when there is already a pre-existing raid setup. this may be a silly request, but it will give you some idea of my level of knowledge.

as a poor alternative to a full kernel dump, i will try to attach a text file of 1 of the many minidumps that i have saved. i also might be able to do the western digital diagnostic you mentioned without the 'repair' option. Crash List.txt

i am also beginning to wonder if it would be easier to make a clonezilla iso image of the whole hard rive system and then do a complete reformatting and totally new installation of either win 7 or the original win xp pro. the computer was working well before this problem occurred, and it could probably benefit from a thorough cleaning and selective reinstlation of things i really need.

any further suggestions will be appreciated.

jorvik

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The crash dump analysis if you provide a dump will most likely point the root cause of the problem and formating/reinstalling the computer might not be a solution.

Safe mode doesn't load many drivers/services and don't load any program so the fact that it doesn't doesn't crash in safe only point out almost everything that is launched in normal mode and isn't in safe mode and it is a lot.

Machine check exceptions usually point to an hardware component (as explained there) but it could be almost any hardware component. I also read that nvidia drivers might do this kind of things (you could easily remove the nvidia drivers to find out).

If the root cause is an hardware problem, reinstalling won't help and i wouldn't install window 7 on this computer as it need more resource than XP.

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