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New HD, Windows boot hang - invalid BPB??
vonPoonBurGer
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey all,
I've encountered an utterly baffling problem, so I'm hoping you can give me some advice. My dad bought himself a nice new PC a few months back, and he's picked up some parts for me to add to it. A new DVD burner, and a new 320G SATA2 HD. The DVD burner installed without a hitch, aside from some master/slave foolishness, but the HD is giving me fits. It's connected to the second of four SATA ports. The boot HD is connected to the first SATA port.
The BIOS sees the new HD, and correctly recognizes its capacity. It's a completely separate drive from the boot drive, so there's been no issues with the BIOS finding and starting the boot partition. The problem is, ~75% of the time, when I try to boot Windows normally with the new drive powered on, Windows hangs at the low-res boot screen, where you see the Windows XP logo and three little blue blocks moving back and forth. Thinking it just didn't like the new drive being uninitialized, I booted into Safe Mode, and was able to initialize and format the new drive with a single NTFS partition taking up the whole of the drive. However, boot-time hangs are still pretty common, though sometimes Windows will actually boot, and thus fake me out into thinking I've fixed things. Safe Mode has been 100% reliable in booting, so it's gotta be something Windows is doing on a normal boot, I'm just not sure what. I've tried Last Known Good, but it just does the same thing as a regular boot.
Has anyone seen an intermittent boot issue like this with a new large hard drive? Any tips on how I can troubleshoot this issue? I tried booting with boot logging enabled, but a) that's one of the few times it thwarted me by booted normally, and b) how can I get into the system to see that boot log (it gets overwritten every time I go into Safe Mode, I think)? Any advice would be welcome. Thanks!
I've encountered an utterly baffling problem, so I'm hoping you can give me some advice. My dad bought himself a nice new PC a few months back, and he's picked up some parts for me to add to it. A new DVD burner, and a new 320G SATA2 HD. The DVD burner installed without a hitch, aside from some master/slave foolishness, but the HD is giving me fits. It's connected to the second of four SATA ports. The boot HD is connected to the first SATA port.
The BIOS sees the new HD, and correctly recognizes its capacity. It's a completely separate drive from the boot drive, so there's been no issues with the BIOS finding and starting the boot partition. The problem is, ~75% of the time, when I try to boot Windows normally with the new drive powered on, Windows hangs at the low-res boot screen, where you see the Windows XP logo and three little blue blocks moving back and forth. Thinking it just didn't like the new drive being uninitialized, I booted into Safe Mode, and was able to initialize and format the new drive with a single NTFS partition taking up the whole of the drive. However, boot-time hangs are still pretty common, though sometimes Windows will actually boot, and thus fake me out into thinking I've fixed things. Safe Mode has been 100% reliable in booting, so it's gotta be something Windows is doing on a normal boot, I'm just not sure what. I've tried Last Known Good, but it just does the same thing as a regular boot.
Has anyone seen an intermittent boot issue like this with a new large hard drive? Any tips on how I can troubleshoot this issue? I tried booting with boot logging enabled, but a) that's one of the few times it thwarted me by booted normally, and b) how can I get into the system to see that boot log (it gets overwritten every time I go into Safe Mode, I think)? Any advice would be welcome. Thanks!
vonPoonBurGer on
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Posts
Otherwise maybe update the SATA controller drivers?
A workaround would be to make it an external drive with some USB or Firewire enclosure. External HDDs have the transfer rate limited to ~30MB/s, with firewire being a bit faster IIRC (or maybe it used less system resources?).
At night, the ice weasels come."
There are no newer drivers for this system on the HP website, and I installed the latest BIOS, so I don't think there's much more to do there. Sadly, HP support won't do much for us, since their first troubleshooting step is "remove all 3rd-party hardware". Since the system boots fine without the new drive installed, it's not their problem as far as they're concerned. Super. :roll:
Since it's a Seagate drive, I downloaded Seagate's drive diagnostic utilities and tried those. The physical drive checks out fine, but it was showing a 320GB FAT16 partition. Man what?? That's not even possible... I tried running the diagnostics against that partition, and it gave me an "Invalid BPB" error. Anyone ever encounter something like that before?
I also tried the boot-from-CD-ROM DiskWizard utility from Seagate's website, but it has a similar problem to Windows. The utility starts, but hangs when it tries to inspect the drives in the system. At this point, I think I'm going to call Seagate for help, but if anyone has any other suggestions, let me know.
If that doesn't tell you anything then I think SiSoft Sandra will be able to identify the hardware, though I'm not sure.
edit: Oh, and do check if they are the same model - if they are then it might be a problem with the drive itself.
At night, the ice weasels come."