Hard Disk Error

I have posted this in another thread but I wanted to clarify the issue.

I have the following set up in my system:

WinXP (SATA 1)
Vista (SATA 2)
DVD-RW (IDE 1 Master)
DVD-RW (IDE 2 Slave)
160G hard drive (IDE 3 Master)
80G hard drive (IDE 4 Slave)

When OSS boots up, it tells me it has an error in hard disk 3. I'm assuming it is referring to the 160G drive. I have disconnected the two IDE hard drives and OSS boots up fine with no errors. I have ran chkdsk /r on both IDE drives and no errors were reported after it completed.

Is hard disk 3 the 160G drive? What could be causing the error? OSS is taking a long time to boot because of it, and I have to be in front of the PC to tell it to ignore the error which is a pain. I like to turn the PC on and have it boot into the default OS when I come back to the terminal. Could someone please help me. I have ran a disk diagnostic on the hard drives and they both check out ok.

Thanks

 

Did you try disabling the CD-ROM drivers for OSS as suggested in the other thread?

 

Yes I did. Disconnecting the two IDE drives and leaving the DVD-RWs and SATAs connected causes no errors.

 

Did you try disconnecting the CD/DVD drives and leaving all the hard drives connected?

Are you familiar with Linux? Do you have a Live Linux CD (like Ubuntu or Knoppix)? Sometimes there can be irregular values or settings in the partition structures on the drive. fdisk -l from Linux will usually display details on this problem if it exists.

It may be that OSS is just having a problem with properly detecting the IDE drives. Have you contacted Acronis support (Live Chat is probably the best option right now -- if it works) to see if they can give you an updated build. I know they have one because others have reported receiving it.

 

Another way to tell is to connect only one of the IDE hard disks at a time in order to confirm which disk is causing the problem.

 

I narrowed it down to the 160G drive. With it disconnected, OSS boots up fine. Will Live Linux help me fix the problem with the drive? I'm assuming I boot from the disk and run fdisk -l? Does it repair problems? I ran Western Digital's utility on the drive and it checked out okay. It (OSS) always reports the same sector as having a problem.

 

Sometimes OSS will get confused about drives. You can't always go by the disk number reported. You've probably already done this, but make sure you've disconnected all other drive devices. For example: Media card readers, printers with media card readers, iPODs, etc. This is why I asked about the CD/DVD drive(s). Though, it sounds like you've got it narrowed down to one of the IDE drives.

If you use Ubuntu, you'd need to start the Terminal program and then enter the following command:

Code:

sudo fdisk -l <ENTER>

(that's a lower-case L)

The output would be for each drive, listing the partitions. I'm not saying that's the problem, but I've used this before to detect non-matching partition parameters and other corruption. Usually, the fix is to clear the partitions and rewrite the partition table. Of course, that deletes everything on the drive so you have to have it backed up if it's important.

 

I reformatted the problematic drive earlier, and recreated the partition table (NTFS). The error still occurred. I'll see about getting a hold of the program and try what you suggest. I'll report back when I have done this.

Thanks

 

Well, I downloaded another Western Digital utility--Data Lifeguard. I reformatted the drive in Windows XP as NTFS and it showed up as NTFS in Windows; however, in Lifeguard it showed up as Fat 16. I used it to reformat the drive as NTFS, verified that it showed up as NTFS and OSS booted fine with no errors. Odd. I've had problems with this drive losing its partition map since I bought it. I guess it's been Fat 16 the whole time. I wonder why Windows XP showed it as NTFS. Anyway, problem solved.

Thanks for all your help.