Hard drive seen by BIOS, but cant boot

BIOS update, EIDE card, or overlay software? (FAQ Hard disk recognition)
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frost
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Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2002 5:17 am

Hello. Anyone willing to help?

I have a 1Gig Athlon w/Win98SE and a 40 gig HD.
Problem: Hard Disk is no longer recognized at boot up.
Error - "Invalid media type reading drive C:"

It was working fine until yesterday. Now, BIOS detects the hard disk
fine. FDISK sees the HD also. SCANDISK failed - "cannot examine drive
C:". Booting to a floppy then trying to see HD dir doesnt work - same
error. Detaching HD and hooking it up to another PC was successful, all
the data is still intact. Scanning with latest definitions produced no
abnormal results, HD seems clean. Just be sure I checked the cables,
jumpers (stuff didnt change since before it was working fine). No
AntiVirus upgrades have taken place on that HD.

Trying to reinstall Windows failed, cant use the drive or some message
to that extent. Seems I may be able to do it if I chose to reformat the
drive, which I am not willing to do.

I am stuck with switching the HD into another system, at least for now.
Could this be a motherboard error? May be a BIOS upgrade will fix it?
This is a Award Software mother board and they charge for BIOS upgrade, I would like to avoid that. Please help. Just in case, here is my board info:

award modular bios V6.00PG version VDA42
AZ11E
06/26/2000-VT8363-VT686A6A6LMF09C-00

Thanks a lot in advance

Mike
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

Did you hook it up as the boot disk in the other system ? If not, try that and see if it can boot. If not the problem is likely to be in the Master Boot Record.
Sometimes this sort of error can occur if the drive type has changed in the CMOS. Is it set to "auto" ?
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
shankar
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Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Sep 15, 2002 5:11 pm

I'm having the same problem too.

I'm using a Soyo EMA+ with the latest BIOS from SOYO with AMD K6-II 500MHz and 256MHz crucial tech PC 100 SDRAM.

I was having other problems http://www.wimsbios.net/phpBB2/viewtopi ... =8036#8036 with my PC and had not gotten a chance to install my second hard drive until last night. It is a WD 40G 7200rpm drive.

My older drive is also a WD 8.4G on which I installed Win98 SE. It is working fine.
There are 2 IDE channels on the motherboard. I have connected CDROM and CDRW drives on the second channel. On the first channel, I have the older 8.4G drive. Wanted to connect the new drive as a slave.

Before I installed the new drive, I made the right jumper settings on both the drives with the working drive as the master and the new drive as the slave.

The BIOS sees them both. However when its time to boot, windows hangs.
Just the logo and nothing happens after that. No messages.

If I disconnect the second drive windows boots.
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