Bl00dy Frustrating

[Ex-Bay]

I had thought of putting this in "What grips my sh1t" but it is a PC problem.
The PC is an ABIT KT7 MBd with Athlon 3000XP, 1GB RAM, with a SATA HDD and a caddy-based HDD, running an "now made kosher" Win XP pro (with 21.5% VAT added! ). For some obscure reason, I cannot now boot with the caddy in place because the BIOS seems to think that the IDE in the caddy IS the Main HDD (so I cannot back-up some of the data).

The Hard drive (80G) was getting full (75G) and things had slowed down to silly speeds. Lots of "session"thingys on Process Explorer and the odd hick-up, and a strange error report that it could not find "something.dll: re-install or contact Webroot for help" before carrying on to load up.

Several programmes did not work any more (WTF?), such as Nero (so backup data to CD/DVD is not easy). Even FaH is 'flakey'. So I started cleaning it out. Get rid of some of the unused programmes (using Add/Remove Software) , such as CFS1 & 2. As I progressed, I found it necessary to run Registry Booster or CCleaner several times, particularly after getting too many of the dreaded "Blue screen of Death" or a simple Freeze-up. This had several variations including EIRQ_NOT_LEE_OR_EQUAL and the latest, tonight, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGE_AREA, which have me baffled. Even getting into MSN or the Goat are problematic.

I really don't know what to do, other than chucking it out of the Window and finding my old DOS box. I've re-installed Spy Sweeper and a sweep this afternoon revealed a Trojan down-loader, now in Quarantine. Even NoScript is acting up with options I wot not of (WTF is Googlesyndication ?).

I want to get this machine back running before I rip it's guts out and put it into another case and install a new MBd into this one (it's bigger and better ventilated for the Athlon 64 thing that's going in).

The last time this sort of thing happened was a couple of years ago and it took me a week to sort it out; trouble is I cannot remember how I did it.

Sorry it's along one, but I am getting highly peeved with it. Any practical advice would be very welcome. The outcome of this, if successful, should put another (and quicker) processor to FaH at the very least.

:S

 

[CodeMonkey]

it sounds like one of the partition on the caddy harddrive is still set as active(boot from me) so it's trying to boot there and there is no boot program/bootloader installed on it.

you need to make the make sure that all the partions on the caddy drive are not set active.

As to how to do this, try first making sure that the BIOS is set to boot from your SATA drive first, you will need both fitted first.

If that succeeds once you are in windows carry out the following.

go to control panel -> adminstrative tools -> computer management -> storage and toggle the boot flag of the old hardrive to prevent any further problems.

The other way is to boot from say a windows 98 boot disc/cd and run fdisk to toggle the active partion flag that way.

Have you ever used a linux Live CD?? If so it's a piece of **** to do.

 

[monobrow]

it sounds like one of the partition on the caddy harddrive is still set as active(boot from me)

Ish...
(Standby for a bit of educated guessing...)
It's less to do with boot partitions and more likely to be that it is detecting a data source which "could" be booted from, and a promt to go check your boot order. You need to know what you had connected when you slammed in the windows CD and re-create that. If the caddy was connected, leave it on, but the BIOS should moan once if it's left on. If you set it up without the caddy, leave it disconnected at boot, then once windows is on, connect it.

 

[Ex-Bay]

Thanks guys.
To be honest, I'm more concerned keeping the damned machine running a single SATA HDD running without interruption before worrying about caddies. I know that one IDE caddy has Win ME on it, but I think it's a BIOS set-upproblem. I'll have to print some pretty pictures from the screen to illustrate my problem better.