Re: New build XP OS instlall problem SATA HD

In article <>, wrote:
>Put together an ASUS M2N-SLI AMD 6400 CPU combination With
>windows XP Home edition
>
>I initially had the single SATA HD hooked up to the SATA 1 connection
>but upon windows attempting to copy files to HD it could not find HD.
>
>I changed it to SATA 2 connection and Windows XP copied its files to
>the HD just fine then it went into the first reboot. Upon reboot I
>noted on screen that no HD were found and screen goes black.
>
>After a short time the following appears on black screen
>
>Windows could not start because of a computer disk Hardware
>configuration problem.
>Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk
>hardware.
>Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk
>configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional
>information.
>
>
>
>Any help would be appreciated
Go into the bios and make sure its set for IDE emulation mode, not AHCI mode.

wrote:
>> Go into the bios and make sure its set for IDE emulation mode, not AHCI mode.
>
>
> The only place I see AHCI is in JMicron RAID controller settings and
> it is in IDE there

Is only one hard drive present during the OS installation ?
I disconnect the other drives, when installing Windows.

Set the boot order in the BIOS, to something like

floppy, CDROM, Hard_Drive

And in the hard drive section, check that your only hard
drive is present as the first item in the list_of_hard_drives.

Then try the install again.

It could be that the line in the boot.ini, doesn't match
how the BIOS is enumerating the drive. (I've had that
problem in Debian as well, and edit grub to fix it.)
I don't know how you fix a boot.ini in Windows, if the
OS won't boot (at least, without other tools).

*******

In terms of things you can get for free, to test boot the machine

1) Hard drive diagnostic. Seagate has a DOS version of a disk test
program you can get. Some brands of hard drive, don't offer
diagnostics like that.

2) Memtest86+ from memtest.org is another self-booting product.

Maybe you can do a few simple checks like that, that the
components are OK.

You can also test with a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix, but that
is a pretty big download. Being a LiveCD, it doesn't install
anything, but offers a way to do maintenance. I adjust
the partition table there (Linux FDISK), format partitions
(mkfs), do disk dumps (dd), and can also delete files from
NTFS partitions. There is even a copy of the "testdisk" program,
for correcting problems with the partitions versus the
partition table. I like the 5.3.1 release the best,
for that purpose.

Paul