Weird PC Problem- I Don't Know What The Heck Is Happening!!!

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

Hello,

I don't quite know how to begin explaining this.

I have an ASUS P800 Deluxe motherboard and 3 Pulsar cards installed ( two 6 DSPs and one 4 DSP), two hard drives, Matrox graphic card and 3.01 GHz.

About once a year I do a wipe of my hard drives ( to get rid of all the crud like demos and things like that) using Gdisk and restore with Acronis the last best image I had made. But now here is the problem:

To do a Gdisk I have to change my configuration into Compatible Mode (rather Than Enhanced Mode) as it is a Windows 98 thing, which doesn't work in enhanced mode. I have never had problems with it till now. Gdisk always wipes the C drive, but it now wipes the D drive. The C drive isn't even recognised. I tried to just do a good old fashioned format of the C drive. No luck there either. Instead the C Drive isn't even recognised. Instead I get this "error" message:

"the specified drive is not valid or there is no disk in the drive

I tried another disk wiping utility by Paragon. Once again no luck. It sees the D drive but not the C. Anyway, I wipe the D drive seeing that I may as well, but things get weirder. Now there is no D drive because it's wiped and bear in mind the C drive isn't recognised. Yet, when the PC boots the C drive is there even though it was not recognised when I tried formatting or wiping.

Then other weird things happen. The Found New Hardware Wizard then detects that it needs to install RAID drivers. It's never happened before. I don't use RAID and it is disabled in the BIOS anyway.

I am going nuts trying to figure it all out and just can't. I have gone into the Bios to see if somehow it gets reset everytime I boot up, but the BIOS remains at my settings ( which have always been fine, just in case you may think I screwed something up there).

The sum up these are the problems:

1) The D drive is wiped when the default should be the C drive.
2) The C drive isn't recognised not even to format in the standard way, Yet it is there on bootup.
3) The PC looks for Raid drivers, which it never has before and they are disabled in the BIOS anyway.
4) I am going fucking crazy trying to figure it out !!!

I am no tech wizard, but I wonder whether the motherboard is screwed up and I might need a new one, or maybe a BIOS flash update will fix it, or could it even be a simple thing like a battery going flat.

The trouble is If I need a new motherboard, I need one that has at least 4 PCI slots preferably 5 to accomodate my 3 Cards plus graphic card. Plus I am worried about the hassle of reauthorising all my software, which has limited authorisations

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and sorry for the long winded post.

[Neutron]

does the c drive show up correctly in the BIOS?

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

does the c drive show up correctly in the BIOS?

Yes it does show up in the BIOS (thanks for the quick response by the way).

[Neutron]

well I dont know about that program "paragon" maybe it screwed up your master boot record.

you do not ever need to completely "wipe" a hard drive unless you have state secrets on there., just formatting it is fine, or even delete and then recreate the partition with fdisk.

if you can boot from your win98 cd see if you can run fdisk /mbr
from it (it tries to fix the master boot record)

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

well I dont know about that program "paragon" maybe it screwed up your master boot record.

you do not ever need to completely "wipe" a hard drive unless you have state secrets on there., just formatting it is fine, or even delete and then recreate the partition with fdisk.

if you can boot from your win98 cd see if you can run fdisk /mbr
from it (it tries to fix the master boot record)

Once again, thanks for your very quick reply. I know I have a Windows 98 boot disk somewhere, but I haven't used Win 98 for years. Any chance you can explain step by step how I do your suggestion. Preferably with idiot proof instructions ( I am an idiot by the way).

Thanks

[Neutron]

i thought the system was win98? if it is, and you have a floppy drive you can get a new boot disk (floppy creator exe) from bootdisk.com which should have the chkdsk on it.

if its XP then you can do similar thing, put in the XP cd and "repair from recovery console" when the prompt comes up just type fixmbr.

another thing is, you might want to disconnect the d drive from your computer before you do anything else.

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

Thanks Neutron for your help. Unfortunately, your suggestion hasn't worked. Any other ideas?

[ScofieldKid]

Any chance your motherboard battery might have gone dead and put you in a situation where you are getting boot-default settings? New batteries aren't too difficult to find if that's the case.

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

Any chance your motherboard battery might have gone dead and put you in a situation where you are getting boot-default settings? New batteries aren't too difficult to find if that's the case.

I don't know, but I doubt it. If I was getting boot default settings I would presume that the changes I made in the BIOS would go back to the default settings. However, the changes I made have remained without going back to default. I guess it's not what you suggested. I might try a BIOS update to see if it works, though I am not too optimistic.

Thanks for responding.

[sonicstrav]

I think I would wipe everything off the hard drive that had the OS on it - reinstall the OS on it and try to salvage as much stuff from your other hard drives.

If the c: drive is recognised perhaps reinstall the OS on that, reload all the disk managment programs and work from there.

Faiiling that I would take out all the HDDs - buy a new one and install the OS on that, the other drives that do not have an OS on can be later put in the PC and you could salvage data from that.

I do feel your back ups might be no good.

But there is always a way

Failing that - take out your Scope cards, get a big crowbar and whack the PC to bits ( only joking )

Sorry, it's a pain - my ' solutions' are pretty crude - but it's the way I would approach it if all other lines of inquiry went nowhere.

[Astral Fridge Magnet]

Any chance your motherboard battery might have gone dead and put you in a situation where you are getting boot-default settings? New batteries aren't too difficult to find if that's the case.

Eureka !!!! That was exactly the problem. Out of frustration I took my PC to a computer repair shop and they discovered the problem in about 5 minutes. It was just a flat motherboard battery. I am so glad that was all it was.

Strav100, I considered attacking my PC with a crowbar.


Thank you to everyone who responded to my cry for help. I am very grateful.

[hubird]

pfew!

[sonicstrav]

Great you got your PC fixed and didn't have to smash it up