Hey all , my psu died on me last week, and then systematically i managed to bugger the cmos on my mobo (dont ask how) anyway, i've just replaced the mobo today, and windows comes to the... 'start windows normally' 'start in safe mode' etc window. I try to start up in any of them, or even resort back to previously known working settings, and it restarts the pc. I try to repair/reinstall windows and it tells me i have no harddisk. Bios finds my harddisk, and i wouldn't think the 'start windows normally' window would come up without a working harddrive, is it windows being spacky or has my hdd become foobar'd and destroyed my faith in humanity
This will happen almost every time that you replace a motherboard without reinstalling Windows. Your best bet would be to use the repair installation feature on your boot CD to fix the Windows installation without losing any data.
As i kinda said already, i've tried to reinstall/repair but windows tells me it cant find a harddisk after finding kernel's and drivers etc, before i get to the repair/new install options. but as i said earlier a dead harddrive wouldn't even give me that xp start page it the mobo should just say no OS or at worst no HDD surely? bit of a tommy tickler :s
i've checked all the ones i normally do, to be fair i dont change a lot i'm not even going to try and claim i'm any good with BIOS. the BIOS does see a harddrive in boot options, but there is nothing in the primary devices only the dvd-rw in the secondary. I thought this was correct for SATA though? its been so long since i've looked. feel free to laugh/correct me!
have you tried going into safe mode - then installing your sata drivers / mobo drivers then restarting?
i can't get into safemode or regular windows, it restarts when attempting to access either. All i have access to is POST screens, and BIOS.
Gulp. Unless anyone here can help further - I think you may have to do a clean install.... Unless you have a pata drive kicking around you can put windows onto?
ok...well i can make windows find my hdd by giving it 3rd party raid drivers when prompted to rpess f6, however when the install keeps going it gets to a stage where it says it cannot find 'VIAMRAID.sys' if i press esc to ignore it, it loads the other files then restarts. VIAMRAID.sys is a file on the floppy containing the raid drivers. Any ideas?
Could be two things I can think of atm. Have you got the correct raid drivers? Usually they can be found on the motherboard manufacturer's website as a floppy disk creator tool. When you pressed F6 to load extra drivers and then chose the appropriate driver, then it appeared to read off the disk yadda yadda.. did you leave the floppy disk in? You have to leave it in until just before it reboots.
ah, i was doing that thankyou kenco. The raid driver installation had set my hdd default in BIOS to raid despite only 1 hdd beind present, i switched the SATA controller to [SATA] and all is well, and am on my pc now happy as larry! )
