Can't boot. (SATA related. I think.)

OtherLeadingBrandsOtherLeadingBrands
edited November 2005 in Hardware
XP has been giving me problems this past week.
Finally, I find myself unable to boot it entirely: missing hal.dll
I have tried to repair my installation. Listed below.

My relevant specs:
XP Professional
3200+ AMD
Gigabyte Nforce3 K8N Pro
2 Western Digital 120GB (Raid-striped)
ATI 9800XT

It will try to boot from CD.
If the WinXP CD is in the drive, it goes to setup, which will not allow me to install or repair my installation, because it says that setup can not find the hard disks. Reboot.

I changed the boot order in BIOS to:
CDROM
HDD-0
HDD-1

Now booting, it says:
Incomplete RAID set! (Press F4 or Ctrl-S)

If I have no CD in the drive, it says:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER


If I press F4 as stated above, it shows:
0 PM
1 SM WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0 114473MB

Set0 invalid RAID drive
1 WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0 114473MB


I do not know where to go from here.
Please do not make me reformat.
I should also state that I am not a tech. I know nothing of IRQ, jumpers, etc.
I also can not give any detailed information regarding the RAID setup, because I am not the one that did it. I know that it is not mirrored. It is striped. It read both drives as seperate drives. (C: and D: )
It ran flawlessly for a year and a half.

Comments

  • zero-counterzero-counter Linux Lubber San Antonio Member
    edited November 2005
    Unfortunately, based on what your limitations are in relevant aspects to computers, I would suggest that you take it to a local technician. It is possible that the array is broken, and may not be repairable. Striped drives tend to work in such a manner.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2005
    What he said.

    We have a couple hard drive and RAID experts here at Short-Media. I'm sure they'll find this thread. But while we are waiting:

    I highly recommend against using RAID 0 unless a) you are highly proficient with computer hardware and that b) you make regular system backups. I ran RAID 0 for a couple years. Even with regular, full system backups, I eventually came to the conclusion that the performance gain was not worth the reliabilty pain. Haven't touched RAID since July 2003. BTW, the performance gain of RAID 0 over a single hard drive for everyday computer usage is not much, despite what all the benchmarks show.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited November 2005
    Sadly, if you are getting that message, that means exactly as the others have stated. That's a busted RAID-0 array. With IDE RAID, there isn't much you can do to get that back.

    Il wait till one of the RAID serious affectionados pops into this thread, they may have a suggestion (paging Tex to the thread).
  • SiggySiggy Sydney Australia
    edited November 2005
    Basically it is not seeing one of your hard drives - therefore the raid array is no longer valid.

    Before you try anything I would replace the cables - notorious for coming loose - and see if that fixes anything, if not I would wait for Tex!!!!

    I also agree with Leonardo - The only raid I was happy with was Mirroring - Back up on the go! Striping always gave me sleepless nights - if it goes 2 HDD worth of crap gone instead of one!
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