HD Controller Problem

I just installed an Iwill Side RAID100 card. I attached my 2 HDs, one to each IDE channel - set their jumpers to Cable Select (as instructed). But it froze up as it was booting into WinXP... I had to hard restart. Now after saying "Verifying DMI Pool Data....." I get some garbage text and then nothing. I ran ScanDisk on the drives and it found tons of errors on my C drive but fixed them all, but I still can't boot to anything but a floppy.

Is my HD fried?? =(

I also discovered that Iwill has negligable tech support - only FAQs and drivers... no way to contact them.

Appreciate your input.

-Dr. Jay

 

It's probably due to the fact that XP is trying to load the drivers for your old HD controller. If XP has a safe mode I would boot to that, remove the old IDE controller and try to boot to Windows again.

 

I tried connecting both HDs to one IDE channel and now I at least get to the boot menu (I have Win98 and WinXP installed) but neither will successfully boot... or even give me the option of safe mode.

I can't seem to get to my Win98 install files in the Win98 directory on my second drive for some reason to reinstall. Argh! ScanDisk says there is a long file name error that it cannot correct, but other than that finds nothing. When I DIR the volume there are some odd characters by some of the directory names (like the Win98 directory there is an "a" with a accent above it off to the right of the directory name).

Guess I have to find my damn CD. Looks like one of the IDE cables was bad... too bad I have no way to even contact Iwill for a replacement.

-Dr. Jay

 

As a last resort always try getting to a DOS prompt and typing 'fdisk /mbr'.

That command has saved me SO many times and for the oddest problems. Garbled directories, viruses, seemingly trashed hard drives.

Just give it a shot before you do anything drastic.

 

Hrmm.. things have gotten worse. During installation of both Win98 and WinXP the computer would hard crash (suddenly power down) after the reboot and the beginning of setup. Now the computer says
"Disk Error
Press any key to reboot"
after "Verifying DMI..." and I get no boot menu, but I can boot from floppy. fdisk /mbr doesn't help. Scandisk finds no problems. Argh! wimper wimper...

Oh and I updated the BIOS for the Iwill card but that had no effect either.

-Dr. J

 

Does either HD boot without the RAID controller and just the normal Intel IDE controller that the computer should already have drivers and stuff for?

 

Hello,
I would keep everything the way it was and install the raid controller in the PC and boot to both OS's, and see if it is there or if it will install the drivers for it. Then I would disable the IDE ports on the MB from the Bios.
Good Luck