Vista Recovery problem

[Chris6681]

Hello,

Well a few nights ago my computer started to play up, it kept on freezing while in windows and then it would eventually go into a BSOD so I decided to leave it off for the night. Next thing in the morning, I turned my PC on and it wouldn't even boot into Windows, it would BSOD while booting and then restart.

So I decided to put the Vista recovery CD in that was shipped with my system. All went well until I had to select my drive with Windows on it. "No drives were found. Click to load driver."

But the funny thing is that when I clicked on "Browse"(to load a driver) I could search through C:\, which is my hard drive! I checked in the BIOS and my HDD is there.

I'm using 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium, which is also on the recovery CD.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

[BipolarBill]

Is this a brand name PC? If so, formatting the drive was a mistake because the recovery process probably had a recovery partition on the drive that you erased. It's always best to read the PC documentation or *call* support before embarking on such a drastic journey.

There is no easy answer to your problem. There may be a special driver available for your PC model's SATA controller. Check the downloads page at the maker's site for your model.

An alternative fix is to enter BIOS setup, find the SATA mode switch and change it to "IDE Emulation" or whatever "Engrish" term that your BIOS calls it. There is no standard name for it, so the foreign tech writers are free to translate it any way that's easiest for them that day. All I can tell you is that the alternative to IDE Emulation is AHCI. That's what you don't want.

[Chris6681]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BipolarBill

Is this a brand name PC? If so, formatting the drive was a mistake because the recovery process probably had a recovery partition on the drive that you erased. It's always best to read the PC documentation or *call* support before embarking on such a drastic journey.

There is no easy answer to your problem. There may be a special driver available for your PC model's SATA controller. Check the downloads page at the maker's site for your model.

An alternative fix is to enter BIOS setup, find the SATA mode switch and change it to "IDE Emulation" or whatever "Engrish" term that your BIOS calls it. There is no standard name for it, so the foreign tech writers are free to translate it any way that's easiest for them that day. All I can tell you is that the alternative to IDE Emulation is AHCI. That's what you don't want.

Okay, so I went into the BIOS and found nothing about "IDE Emulation" or the SATA mode switch. The only things related to IDE that I found were :-

In the "Standard CMOS Features" Menu :-

• IDE Channel 0 Master [None]
• IDE Channel 0 Slave [DVDRW IDEA 16X]
• IDE Channel 2 Master [None]
• IDE Channel 3 Master [None]
• IDE Channel 4 Master [None]
• IDE Channel 5 Master [None]
• IDE Channel 6 Master [Optiarc DVD RW AD-71]
• IDE Channel 7 Master [SAMSUNG HD321KJ]

Upon pressing enter on IDE Channel 7 Master (Hard Drive) I get this :-

IDE Auto-Detection [Press Enter]

Extended IDE Drive [Auto]
Access Mode [Auto]


Under the "Intergrated Peripherals" menu I get this :-

On-Chip IDE Channel [Enabled]

IDE Prefect Mode [Enabled]

NV Serial-ATA Controller [All Enabled]

NV SATA RAID function [Disabled]


All of that is only what I found related to IDE in the BIOS. Oh, and the Hard Drive doesn't have a recovery partition on it as it was bought from a custom-build OEM. The recovery CD is pretty much just an installation for Windows Vista.

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4.


Thanks,
Chris

[BipolarBill]

You need to look in other categories. There is definitely a SATA mode selection in that BIOS. Look in Integrated Peripherals > Serial-ATA RAID Config. Set it for ATA.

Your SATA drivers are here:

GIGABYTE - Support&Download - Motherboard - Driver - GA-M57SLI-S4 (rev. 1.0)

They are under "SATA RAID". You need them. Press F6 when starting Setup and provide them.

[Chris6681]

Okay so I pressed F6 during the Windows installation and it did nothing. There was, however, a "Load Driver" option when the Windows installation doesn't find any drives. So I used this option and browsed through my memory stick (which had the driver). When i selected the folder three options came up. They were :-

NVIDIA nForce RAID Controller
NVIDIA nForce RAID Device
NVIDIA Serial ATA Controller

I loaded all three of them and still no luck.

[BipolarBill]

Have you gone into the BIOS and selected IDE Emulation Mode for the SATA drives? I shouldn't have to keep asking.

[Chris6681]

I didn't find anything called "IDE Emulation" or anything of the sort. The only things that i found that were related to IDE in the BIOS were what I put in my second post. By the way, when do I press F6 to load the driver from a floppy disk?

[BipolarBill]

You press F6 immediately after seeing any screen activity for setting up Vista.

[Chris6681]

Still no luck. I repeatedly pressed F6 during installation and it didn't read the floppy disk at all. I did however try the "Load Driver" option, when you select your HDD, and loaded the drivers from the floppy and didn't work.

I realised I had a copy of Linux (Ubuntu) on a disk. which can be ran from the disk as well. So I tried that to see if it would recognise the hard disk and guess what? It did. I could also browse through the hard disk's data. I also swapped over to a different motherboard and loaded drivers for that as well, didn't work either. So the hard disk clearly hasn't failed and the motherboard's SATA controller isn't dodgy.

A friend of mine thinks it was some sort of malware that destroyed my drivers for my hard disk on the Windows partition, which explains why it can be read from Ubuntu. There's one thing I haven't done which is formatting the hard disk clean. I don't want to do this as it has data on there which i'd rather keep, however, if you reckon that's the reason then I'll do it.

[Xsuperdan]

hello, yes this is common i would suggest loading your other OS and copy all the files you need like pictures work etc, and reinstall windows from the start! please RB with more news