Compuer help needed

[Ivan]

I can't figure this one out.

My computer failed to boot yesterday cxomplaining about missing DLLs.

No problem, I will just reinstall winblows to replace the missing DLLs.

Nope. The hard drives aren't being found. I have a SATA striped raid setup, and in the BIOS it sees the type and manufacturer of the drives but the secotrs cylinders and heads are all zero.

How do I narrow this down to the culprit component so I can replace it. I am befuddled as to whether it is the hard disks the raid controller (on the MoBo) or something else. FWIW its running XP.

Also FWIW, I have to use my wife's computer now, which is filled up with junk like 15 toolbars, 48 smiley apps, 7,500 event sounds and 40 gigs of old baby pictures of the kids. I really need help.

[vanhump]

Try going into your BIOS and setting it to boot from the cd or dvd drive and then boot from your windows disk. That should find your hard drive. Sometimes when it fails to find the hard disk or any disk drives, your ribbon cables are bad and you will have to replace them.

[CatatonicBug]

First thing to do is get rid of the smilies. They are all spyware! Toolbars are often spyware as well. Go through the Add and Remove Programs in the control panel and remove anything that says "toolbar" or "Search" on them.

As far as YOUR computer goes, I would suggest looking for the specific DLLs that are missing online (do a google search) and place them in the locations where they belong in the file system.

Since you have a RAID setup, I would hope that means that your data is redundant, so the loss of a HD is not an issue. Try re-loading the RAID driver, or try moving one of the drives to another PC, to see if the drives are still good.

[rpgoerlich]

Ditto on the spyware tool bars & smiliey Viruses.
The Wife loaded a bunch of the same crap on the laptop. Major viruses as well as spyware. I used Malwarebytes Anti-malware to clean it up. Only had 2 viruses that took more. Used ATF-Cleaner to delete all temp/cache/cookies/history/prefetch/recycle bin files. Then re-ran the malwarebytes for a final clean.

[Bigfoot]

Ivan,
Sent you an email but will reply here as well. You most likely need your raid drivers on floppy. Start windows installation and press f6 when prompted to load raid drivers.

[Ivan]

Thanks for the suggestions. Thanks for the email Harry.

I have a striped raid, so the redundancy is not there. I cant just reload the DLLs, because it wont boot. After the BIOSloads, it just stops complaining about a missing DLL.

When I try to reinstall windows, it boots fine from the CD but says it cannot continue because there are no hard drives.

I will try the suggestions as I get time, hopefully tonight.

If nothing else, Newegg has some open box stuff on the cheap.

[Jerry]

Bigfoot has the right of it. Someplace you should have the software that was used to set up the RAID array. Find it or download it; have it handy on a CD. When you restart from the Windows CD, press F6 to load additional drivers, then put your RAID software disk in the drive and let Windows load the drivers. You will be prompted to remove the RAID software and put the Windows CD back in.

This should load windows to the point where you can either try to repair the existing installation or do a clean install.

[Ivan]

Well, I think my machine is toast. I finally got windows to load by moving the cables from SATA 1/2 to 3/4 and reinstall. Then after the first reboot, same old story. I am not sure wether its the drives or the mobo, but the cost of replacement is half what a newer better machine on the newegg specials page is.

I'd rather spend money on motorcycles though. :rollseyes:

[Fix]

Do you have a raid controller or is it built into the mobo? Controller card would be a less expensive fix. Sorry to hear about your stuff going south. :P

[Ivan]

Its on the mobo. I guess I could go pick up a raid controller and see if it works.

[nate]

Replace the cables going from the Mobo to the hard drives if you haven't all ready.should be like seven bucks from local pc shop.I ended up going back to ide harddrives cause of cable problems.

[Korr]

recently i had a problem with my hard drive clicking and not booting up or even being recognized. I did a full reinstall and windows ran a scandisk on it. that fixed the problem for me. Maybe try running a disk checking program at boot up?
i am running vista32

[Ivan]

New SATA cables have me running, but I lost everything on my HDD.

I am getting lots of BSODs and still pretty frustrated.

[PCTech]

Interesting

First, Korr - If you have been having the "click of death" (as I call it), experience has shown me that your drive IS going to fail sooner than later, I would back it up and then ghost it to a new drive if possible.

Second, it's interesting that the cables have appeared to have failed for you Ivan, that;s fairly unusual. Did you try doing a repair on the OS (now that your systems is seeing the drives) as previously suggested? Also, you could try using OnTrack or some other tool to recover the partitions. It might be difficult to find a tool that will repair a striped array, but I'm sure they're out there. Good luck, data loss SUCKS!

[Ivan]

Well, this computer is 4 years old for me and I bought it used, so It has done its time. I usually don'[t take the data loss to hard, since I don't keep anything utterly important on my machine. The worst part is making a new resume again, if I ever need to interview.