Help please!
I have an AMD 64 running on an ASUS motherboard and everything has been fine until a few days ago when the computer started to freeze after being left idle for about 15-20min, it happens everytime and the only option is rebooting the system. I did some basic checks and got a Disk Failed message:
<controller 0, channel 0, Master>. Then I noticed that on booting:
The Primary IDE Master: Not detected
The Secondary IDE Slave: Not detected
The Secondary IDE Master: PIONEER DVD-RM DV
The Secondary IDE Slave: Not detected

I've got a Samsung CD/DVD-ROM Device Driver for E-IDE on a floppy but I can't get the PC to boot from this, even if I specify A:\.

Is this a hardware failure?

Any help will be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

What model and what chipset of Asus motherboard? also is your hard drive SATA ir IDE?

Thanks for your prompt reply!
My PC runs on an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe.
It's a Dual SATA RAID.
I've got a user's manual but to be honest it's all greek to me.
Thanks.

Gus

Sorry forgot the chipset model

If you have a sata Hard drive it sounds like yu have lost your sata drivers. if it is an IDe drive then I would say you have drive failure.

I've looked in the system info and it's definitely an ATA Hard drive. Is recovering the drives something I can do or I better call the vendor?

Thanks

Gus

From what it have posted it sounds like the hard drive has failed. you can try building a bartPe disk and see if you can acess the drive by booting from the Bart PE disk. not sure if that will work since the bios isnt even picking up the drive. but the only other alternative would be expensive professional recovery.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Have you gone into your bios and made sure you are set to boot from you sata raid?
I hate the board. If you had plugged in a usb hard drive it will alter your bios if you reboot with it.
Go into your bios and make sure your set to boot to your sata raid. I am willing to bet that is your issue. If it cant find your ide1 or 0 that is seperate from the raid. Trust me..
If you need help with the bios let me know i can probably go home tonight and email you more info.

Many thanks for your reply.

I get three options on bios.
1. A:\Floppy
2. HDD VIA KT640
3. Pioneer

None of them seem to work. I guess when you say boot from the SATA you mean the HDD VIA KT640. But this isn't working either.

If I understand correctly I only need the SATA Raid if I have two drives, but I only have one. When I bought the PC it wasn't actually installed. I installed it manually using the CD that came with the AUSS K8V motherboard. This may be causing the problem. But this was a while back. My PC has been working fine until recently.

Any mores ideas.

Thanks a lot.

You can have one drive on there but it will still come up as raid.
So you had Windows on that drive right? That is where you were booting from?
Do you have a spare ide drive (small) you could format and put XP on.
When you go into your bios there are two different places to setup boot.
When you see boot from
hard drive/cdrom/floppy
that is one section.
You will need to go to the section that tells your machine which hard drive to boot from.
Once you set the raid (SATA) up there as first boot then you go back to the section with the cdrom/floppy and set it to boot from the hard drive.

Easy way to tell which type of drive you have is to open your case.
Wide grey cable is PATA
Small slim (any color) cable is SATA.
Which one you got?

I can't remember. Is that nForce4? There is a known compatibility issue with the nforce4 chipset and certain hdds. The work around is to not install the nvidia IDE drivers. Just use the window drivers.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic59081.html the same problem w/ASUS MB.
I have feeling that loupegarou wount be able to boot from another HDD. YellowC4S, do you have any specific info about nForce compatibility with certain HDDs? artemen@gmail.com