After physically installing the WD 100 and connecting it to the second IDE
interface on the controller card, I rebooted with no problem. Using W2k
Disk Mgr, I formatted the second drive as dynamic disk with NTFS. The OEM
disk, formatted as FAT32, was partioned into 3 logical disks, with OS in
one, apps in one and files in one. Second drive formatted fine and seemed
fully functional. I began to copy a folder containg about 15 gigs of MP3
and SHN files to the new drive. Midway thru the process, without any
warning, my machine rebooted. I looked at the files, sysinfo and event log
and found nothing noteworthy (same error msg abt Ultra, otherwise nothing
new). I restarted the copy process. Shortly thereafter, the machine blue
screened, with this error msg: Kernel_Stack_Inpage_Error 00000077, 1,
0xB180491C, 00000000, 0xB9F1A930. I rebooted and began trouble shooting
this problem. The BIOS did not show any hard drives installed. The third
partition of the OEM drive, which contained the music files I had been
copying now showed as empty and unformatted; the other two partitions looked
OK. The new drive showed the files that had been copied. Thinking that the
problem was the PCI cables, I unattached and reattached them and rebooted.
At this time the machine showed no hard drives and would not reboot.
Unfortunately, I did not create an Emergency Repair Disk beforehand. The
OEM drive contain a lot (25 gig) of hard to get music files that I do not
want to lose, in addition to a very comprehensive set op apps that would
take many days to reinstall. I know all of it is still there, the question
is how do I get the PC to recognize the hard disk. I am very adept with
Win2k and day to day hardware issues, but am obviously much less familiar
with the details of hard drives, PCI controller cards, PCI buses/cables, as
well as their BIOS configuration details. In priority, my objectives are:
1) Recover/preserve the music files on the OEM drive
2) If possible, reconnect/reinstall/ the OEM hard drive without losing
the OS, apps and music files.
3) Complete the successful install of the second hard disk.
Please advise. If I need to get local assistance, please recommend a
service provider.
The is one wicked problem you have there. The
problem is basically that connectivity or information on the disks is not
accesible. If the BIOS does not see the drives, it would make me wonder if the
controller had not failed. IF you have another controller card you may want to
try that. Since you had recevied previous errors regarding the controller I
am further suspecting the controller. The Promise Ultra 100 does have a
BIOS/Firmware update posted on the Promise technology web site. Applying the
firmware update may help restore connectivity to the drives, provided the
controller itself is still operational. If the you have another system, you
can more the drives to the other system to see if the data is still there. Of
course, if the primary partition is screwed on the drives then you will have
difficulty access the data on the disks. There are some companies that can
access the hard drives and retrieve the data. That could run into some big
dollars, so you will have to weight that against how valuable the data is to
you. WWW.SYSINTERNALS.COM also has a tool to access the drives of dead system
via a serial connection - interesting, but I am not sure if it will work in
this case.
One company that I have used in the past is OnTrack www.ontrack.com. They can
even repair the drives over a modem or internet connection in some cases.
This was first published in October 2001
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