Confirm or revise diagnosis?

[canetoad]

My work machine. File server on a small peer-to-peer network of 6 machines, all running XP, hard cabled. Machine is about 2 years old, usually always on.

Yesterday, in a flap to get a presentation out the door, the machine rebooted - once then twice, then wouldn't boot at all. 'No boot disc'.

This machine has two hard drives in in. Removed the second, put XP CD in and ran recovery console, fixboot. Told me I had no boot disc. Tried every combination of drives plugged into each pair of the 6 sata plugs with the same result.

Took both hard drives out, connected to other machines and they were fine - able to read and write to both of them.

Put both drives back, XP CD in again and ran Windows installation to the point of choosing which partition to install on. Message was there were no partitions found on the machine.

So, my first diagnosis is a hosed motherboard....but - obviously not the whole board as the CD works, bios loads etc. Just cannot find (tested) working hard drives.

Any other thoughts or suggestions? Can't do much to it until the weekend as I'm still trying to get this tender submission finalised, but very keen to hear what you guys think.

[lpbk2713]

1. Does this machine display the correct time of day?

Just a wild guess. I'm thinking about the CMOS battery.

[canetoad]

5. Yep, it did

up till the time it crashed. I'll try to grab a battery and change it anyway - just to see. Thanks.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Questions ...

Do the driver detect in the BIOS prior to an attempt at boot? Are you familiar with how the machine was first put together? Was the OS installed via an image or with an install disc? If the latter, do you know if it installed cleanly without the need of any external drivers?

XP has problems with some SATA controllers. (This of course is to be expected considering when XP was released and when SATA became a standard. Distribution discs with at least SP2 already slipstreamed into them don't tend to have the problem in my experience.) IIRC, when you first boot the XP disc, it gives you an opportunity to load any external drivers, e.g. SATA drivers, you might need. I ran into this some years ago when attempting an install of XP on a system without an IDE hard drive and had no idea what was going on at the time. The optical still work fine because it was on an IDE driver, but the install system didn't even recognize the hard drive was there, which sounds similar to what you're experiencing.

That's just an attempt at figuring out why XP is having problems. Clearly you've got a larger issue given the reboots.

[canetoad]

6. XP sp2 on disc, purchased OEM with computers

We put together our lists of components for each machine when we bought them and got the shop to build but not install any software or OS. Thus we received the built machines and I installed all drivers, XP etc from discs which we purchased.So I can vouch for the set up of XP, motherboard & graphics drivers etc, as I did it myself and it all went smoothly.

I'd never get this retailer to build another machine as they crushed the external socket of a usb port, put optical disc in wrong bay and I found a couple of other small things unsatisfactory but I can't blame them for software loading.

The board on this machine is a Gigabyte GAEP45 - supposed to be ultra durable. Socket 775 for an Intel dual core processer. There was an incident about six months ago that caused me some worry. An external hard drive (IDE) had stopped working so I decided to put it in my machine and grab the data from it. On connecting it up (2x sata HDD, 1x IDE hdd), the machine wouldn't boot with the same message - couldnt find a hard drive.

I rushed out, bought a new drive and installed and loaded XP and motherboard drivers again without problems. Once it was running, I put the original hard drive in (after removing the IDE drive) to see if I could grab any data on it. To my surprise, the computer found all drives with no problem so I took out the new drive and reinstalled the original and have run it since with no problems.

I put it down to a glitch. The machine has been fine since then. In retrospect, it may have been a warning sign. It still seems to me that there is a (possibly) intermittent fault with the motherboard but I need to sort it out.

On edit:
I've just thought of a common factor in both cases of the machine failing to find the hard drive; each time, I had just added new hardware. First incident, as above - an IDE hard drive. Yesterday I plugged in a second monitor and added UltraMon display manager. Now adding a second screen doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that would cause a computer, especially one with good specs, to crash. I doubt if there is a link.

[struggle4progress]

3. Many years ago at work, all the new machines promptly began having

trouble recognizing the hard drives

Finally figured out it was cheap batteries: the machines lost the BIOS settings whenever shut down. They'd still boot -- if you entered setup immediately after turning them on and reset all the BIOS settings properly

[canetoad]

7. I'll give that a go

and, as I said upthread, will change the battery before doing anything else. Thanks.

[canetoad]

4. People, thanks for the replies

I've just got in after a 16 hr day and my brain is mush so will read them properly tomorrow and take in your suggestions and advice.

Later....... :yourock:

[canetoad]

8. Solved it!

Bloody, buggery Seagate hard drive.

Put new battery in, connected drives and away she went....for 10 minutes. Then reboot, then can't find hard drive.

Here's a short description of the issue from Tom's hardware:http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hard-drive-firmware-bricked,6889.html

Seagate Releases Firmware to Fix HDD Bricks
6:50 PM - January 22, 2009 by Marcus Yam - source: Tom's Hardware US

It’s been a rough past week for Seagate, and even more so for owners of new large-capacity Seagate hard disk drives.

Seagate today issued a much needed firmware fix that hopefully resolves one of the biggest bungles for in recent memory. Last week, Seagate released a preventative firmware update for Barracuda 7200.11 drives affected by a faulty firmware which caused the drive to lock up and fail to be detected by the BIOS. But instead of making the drives more hardy, the firmware turned the fancy drives into magnetic bricks.

Thankfully, the company expedited a fix that couldn’t have arrived too soon for those affected. Seagate today sent word that it “isolated a potential firmware issue in limited number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related SATA drives based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some unique circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.”

Now, I don't know how I missed this, but between work and home I have a bunch of Seagate drives and need to check all of them.

If you have one and are worried, Seagate have a tool to check drive model and number and firmware updates are available. http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931