Fellow Geeks - Assistance?

[Riinuka]

Maybe someone who's had more access to hard drives can help...

I took out the second hard drive from the main computer in the house today, after realizing it was the boot drive from my little scratch-together-from-scrap-parts system..

It has Windows 2000 Professional.

Now, I decided to be silly and try to put this thing in my comp with another drive slaved to it, and was unsuccessful. After messing with the jumpers, I got it right.. then I did something stupid.

I messed with the BIOS, and killed my comp's ability to start. I tried to overclock the processor out of curiosity, forgot to remove the link between the front-side bus and memory channel in regards to overclocking, and watched as the RAM stick started to look a little sparky. xD Needless to say, I unplugged the system, removed the trashed stick, and replaced it with a new one... But, the damage was done. The system wouldn't start, because the RAM I put in didn't match the profile from before. ._.;

Well, about 20 minutes later, I finally found the jumper on the board to reset the BIOS.. I did so, and let out a huge sigh when my monitor actually displayed something when I started the machine.

Then... trouble. At this point, I had a barebones setup. No cards, only the boot drive (with W2000Pro), a 256 MB stick of RAM, no optical drive.

System gets through its check (after telling me the BIOS had been reset), and then goes to the Win2000 black/white load screen. All's well... Then, it reaches the splash screen... about 1/4th of the way through the status bar, I get a BSOD/Stop error.

So, I'm like "Cool, nothing big. Just restart."

Repeat 20 times.

Realize something is wrong.

So, I pull out another drive (the one slaved from earlier), set it to master, try to boot from it. -Exact- same symptoms.. all goes well until about 25% of the way through the splash screen..

So, I yank out an old drive with Windows 98, and the damn thing loads fine. What the hell? Despite being happy at seeing a desktop finally (when at first I thought I'd killed the board), I was still miffed. I'd made a mistake when I pulled that drive out of the main computer..

I put all of the files from the main computer onto that drive, and had not kept them anywhere else. So, this worries me... I decide to slave the drive with the 98 drive as a master, and see if it's detected as a second storage volume. The drive is recognized as a slave in the BIOS, but when I reach the desktop, and click on My Computer.. nothing.

No drive running above 98 will run with my board currently (hell if I know why), and I think there is a problem with drives running with slaves. I tried to put the 2000 drive on as a second IDE channel (slave), and it was again detected in BIOS... but not in the OS itself.

Biggest problem - I don't know the identity of my motherboard. NOWHERE is it written on the board who makes it, what it has in it, and it's this funky orange-iridescent color with odd port placings that make me think it's a mod board. When I default the BIOS, its clock goes back to Dec. of 2002...

Lastly, I've searched numbers of the board in Google, descriptions on all major current and dead mobo manufacturers, and have tried numerous identifying programs in the past...

Closest I got was a purple board minus one PCI slot from mine from... think it was Diamond. Don't remember.

So... main problem - getting my damned files I moved from the big computer, if the only drive that will boot/run is a 98 drive that can't seem to make itself detect other drives, too.

... ._.; This is pissing me off.

[NERD]

......didn't you make a thread about how you got a job at the Geek Squad?

It's odd you can't detech the mobo- the BIOS doesn't give you any information? Did you try entering the setup mode while it boots up?

Anyway, shuffling between two hard drives with two different OS is a pain in the ass. I have no idea if Windows 98 identifies an external hard drive, but maybe it's worth a try getting a hard drive enclosure and plug it in, or access the data from another computer.

[Riinuka]

Yes, I got a job with the Geek Squad. That doesn't mean I suddenly know everything about this; I'm asking here because I thought there might be someone who could point out a simple mistake. Perhaps you didn't realize how insulting that comment sounded...

Thought of the external enclosure, but I don't want to spend the money on that when it's something I won't use otherwise.

BIOS - no info. All diagnostic modes for the OS result in the same thing - a BSOD with a Stop Error code.

Ran a chkdsk /f, no luck... ran chkdsk /r with some of the tools from work, no luck...

Win98 will work with an external drive. I found the driver for it while looking for solutions.

I'm just gonna put the damned thing into the main machine tomorrow (if dad isn't around) and put all of my stuff onto the 4 GB flash drive I've got. I mean... I bought it FOR that, so I might as well do it. Reason that dad can't be around..? I'm not allowed to touch that machine, according to him. Only thing I did was upgrade RAM (it was horrid... 128 MB...), and I got in -trouble-. He thinks computers are still like back when punchcards were the rage.

I have a feeling it has something to do with the way the drives are being handled power-wise.. the Stop Error has the code for 'boot device inaccessible', after seemingly doing fine. I'll test to see how long it takes for the drive to spin up until BSOD time.. I'll bet it's 25 seconds, which is what I saw the BIOS set for under Power Management. That's probably it, actually.. . strange that something like that would affect it, but worth a try.

The only reason I don't suck it up and use the 98 drive is because the other drive had a lot of my device drivers installed, and I don't feel like not being able to use them due to incompatibility. Right now, it seems that the setupwill not run with anything higher than 98, and it pisses me off.

..I just thought of something. FILE SYSTEM. *goes off to tinker some*

[Nebosuke]

The reason that win98 won't detect the slaved HDD is almost certainly that the slaved HDD formatted as NTFS rather than FAT32.

Try this (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsWindows98.html)

[Vic_Rattlehead]

The reason that win98 won't detect the slaved HDD is almost certainly that the slaved HDD formatted as NTFS rather than FAT32.


That just hurt my brain. :(

[Jetsetlemming]

Nebosuke's got the right idea for win98 and your win2k drive.
Did you try another win2k/XP drive in the computer as a master, or just the one that won't work? When a piece of hardware fails in a computer, there's no telling what it might effect otherwise. If it's something extended like the optical drive or floppy disk drive, it's relatively safe, but if it's something directly plugged into the mobo, like the RAM, CPU, or a PCI card? It could have side effects on anything. The win2k drive might've recieved a surge, or scrambled data from the RAM when you tried to boot the computer. You said you're doing this to get info off that win2k drive, right? Then Nebosuke's solution'll fix that problem. As for the drive, I'd recommend wiping it, put a CD drive in the system, and try re-installing windows on it. See how it reacts.

[Random]

Try putting the 2k drive in as the primary master, no other drives in, and boot off a linux live disk - you should be able to mount the drive with something like:
sudo mkdir /mnt/windows
sudo mount -tntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
(Assuming it's the first partition you want to mount..)

Depending on the live disk you may not be able to write to the drive but should be fine reading from it, if the drive itself is working.

[Riinuka]

When I shouted "File system", I meant about the NTFS/FAT32 incompatibility thing, and I've already found a workaround for that.... The only problem with NTFS for Windows 98 is that Dad won't let me open the other machine up to utilize drives, and the OS on that machine is different. So.. I don't have a way of accessing Win2000 files right now from the drive before I can somehow read it.

JetSet - This was in my original post... ._.;; Did you skip it?
So, I pull out another drive (the one slaved from earlier), set it to master, try to boot from it. -Exact- same symptoms.. all goes well until about 25% of the way through the splash screen..

I unseated the CPU and replaced it yesterday after I had removed/replaced jumpers on the board to reset the BIOS. I didn't have an optical drive in, OR any PCI cards... again, something that was said in my first post.. Nothing went awry until I -reset- the board. That's my main problem.

@Random - Too bad I don't have access to a CD burner right now to burn a disc. xP I know, I know.. bad me for not having one already, but I lent mine to someone. ._.;

[Random]

Then get a liveUSB distro and boot from a USB stick.

[Jetsetlemming]

Riinuka, I'm musta missed it. >_> It WAS a long post of yours, after all.

[Nebosuke]

So.. I'm a little confused here (ah well.. it's a little too early to be up on Sunday morning for me :P). Did you solve all of your problems, or are there some remaining?

[setrict]

Maybe I'm confused, but has this drive ever actually booted in the system it's in now? Win2k does not support bios drive access, so if you pull it from one machine with say a via chipset/ide controller and stick it in a machine with a different controller the machine will give you a nice BSOD.

One way to fix that is to boot the drive once in the original system, and change the ide driver to the standard (non chipset specific) one and/or install the driver for the new ide controller... then move it back to the other machine.

Another fix is to boot the repair disk (or hook it up to another machine) and move the system hive backup done during the original OS installation to overwrite the current one with specific hardware information.

Original Hive: c:\winnt\repair\(I forget, it's the one with SYSTEM in it)
Replaces: c:\winnt\system32\config\SYSTEM.

You might wanna backup the file before overwriting, and it has to be called SYSTEM.

[Riinuka]

This is its original system. xD

Would have definitely tried that had I access to another system, which I mentioned earlier I don't.

:/

I fixed it anyway. I went in under a 3rd drive that I found that had Windows 2000 on it, which (miraculously) booted. I then realized that both of the other 2 Win 2000 drives were configured to use with my system BEFORE I'd reset the BIOS.. meaning I'd jumbled up a controller somewhere along the line. I'm kinda lucky that this drive could utilize the basic controller that came with the original BIOS settings... But, hey, it's an old drive, so that makes sense.

for clarification -

Drive 1 = Drive that was master in my system wit win2k, and also served as a backup drive in the family computer for about a month. Recently tried to move it back to my system, successfully worked before I screwed up the BIOS.

Drive 2 = Drive that was slaved to Drive 1 in my system, also had a 2000 installation. Was slaved again when the BIOS went kablooey, and suffered the "aghh!?!? Controllerliahwfa" syndrome along with Drive 1.

Drive 3 = Yet another drive, with Windows 2000 on it, that worked with the default controller and therefor helped me recover drives 1 and 2.

Drive 4 = A 98 drive that I was trying to get to read Drives 1 and 2 on for a while, until I headdesked myself for realizing that Drives 1 and 2 were NTFS volumes. This was right at the end of my second post, and was clarified in later posts.

Ended up just using Drive 3 with Drive 1 drive slaved to it, using the Win2k CD, installed a clean version (as I needed to do that anyway, as it was a mess), set up two partitions on Drive 3 (OS and Files), restarted with 3 slaved to 1, and moved everything back over from Drive 1 to Drive 3>Files. At this point, I was good as far as having a system with my stuff on it, so I decided to "me-proof" my system. I formatted Drive 1 to get rid of its buggy Win2000 installation after moving the stuff back off and called it "Files", as well. I renamed Drive3>Files to Drive3>Sys Files and moved the My Documents path to Drive 1 so that I can have a niiiice seperate place for my stuff in the FAT32 file system in case this shit ever happens again. Which it won't. I'll make sure I don't do it. xD I plan on storing any new program installations in the "Sys Files" Partition of Drive 3 (which is now my main boot drive) so that those are easily recovered should something happen, and I plan to use Drive 1 (which is the faster and larger of the two, spinning at *fake gasp* 7,200 rpms!) to store my personal files (hence the My Documents path move), and to store games so that they may load a mite quicker.

My current "semi-hassle" is getting that darn ethernet controller installed correctly. I know better than to search for drivers in places other than the internet for my audio controller and the VGA adapter, so that's why I'm on now.

I kept the 98 drive (D4) as it was, because now that I'm making every partition/drive in FAT32 (save for the root C: drive, because it has all of the system files and crap), and it'll be able to read all of my precious little documents and things if something happens again.

I also put all of it on my 4 GB USB key, AND backed it up to a folder on the main computer. I plan to burn CDs later, and find a good time with a fast upload speed to also move this to my Box.net account.

Think I'm paranoid enough?

New toy! I've got myself a wireless G PCI card that I'm gonna install. If all goes well, my ties to the family computer will officially be severed, and I may find myself online at times I never thought possible. Only if I can type softly enough though..

[Kaji]

Get a Mac.

*ducks*

[Riinuka]

If I had enough to get one right now, I sure as hell would!

I really want to tinker around with that OS, if I can get into it.

Gah... now my VGA adapter won't work properly, so I can't get into the display/monitor properties to update the drivers for this monitor so it'll display past 16bit color.

...geeeeh. This calls for a videocard hunt.

[Plekto]

When I see the words "sparkly" and "overclock" in the same post, a damaged motherboard is the first thing that comes to mind.

But 2K Pro should boot, if barely, in 256Megs. So something's messed with the board I bet.

[NERD]

With the amount of hardware troubles you are going through, maybe it's smart just to invest in a new system. If you get a laptop, you won't have to worry about browsing porn in privacy during the wee hours of the night/morning.

[ZaichikArky]

With the amount of hardware troubles you are going through, maybe it's smart just to invest in a new system. If you get a laptop, you won't have to worry about browsing porn in privacy during the wee hours of the night/morning.

Yes that would be the smart thing to do... however them computer geek types, it's actually more fun for them to mess around with a really shitty computer and make it run semi decently >_<. I'm not saying that's what you're doing, Riinuka, because i don't get anything posted here, however my boyfriend used to do stuff like that all the time until he finally built his own computer about a year ago. He works for tech support too... has been for 4 years.

And Nerd, let's not be douchebagy here :p. It takes a LOT of experience working in tech support before you're the computer jack of all trades. My boyfriend is VERY experienced when it comes to computer repair. He could get an A+ certification as easy as pie, however it took him 4 years of working for gateway tech support for him to get to the position he's at now.

Computers are very complicated! I'd never work in anything computer-related. Kind of funny because both my parents are engineers. And my deceased grandfather was also an engineer in the USSR. Heh. Good luck with your projects, Riinuka!

[Riinuka]

I love messing with this piece of junk. (I'm using it to post this, so the card works xD)

The thrill of getting it to work is wonderful.

Ended up being a bad DIMM of RAM, actually...

And, Win2000 runs pretty well on 256MB with 64MB of video RAM. It's when you have 128 where it sucks. xD

I FOUND OUT WHAT MOTHERBOARD I HAVE.

It was in the archives at MCE. 'Tis a K7SOM v5.1. I've got the manual/drivers now.

[Trump]

Sparks are trouble for the rest of the computers existence.

[Riinuka]

As soon as I noticed anything, I reset the system, yanked the cord, and immediately tore out the DIMM. I figured out what the "sparks" were by looking at it last night.. It was a plastic label that was starting to corrode. The DIMM itself is still in working condition, and I haven't seen any damage to the slot at all. I'm pretty sure it's alright, and if not, the board's a transition model from 2002 that has SDRAM slots in addition to DDR, so I'll just switch types.

[Trump]

Oh, ok. If it wasn't the electronics there shouldn't be a problem.

[Riinuka]

Nope. ^ ^

Whoo! The VGA controller FINALLY decided to be nice and install correctly, so now I'm back to working at 1280*1024 with 32-bit color! I was at Safe-Mode-esque settings up until now. *shudder* Though that darn audio controller.. says everything's installed and working good, but no sound.. Time to look at the board again.