Hard drive not recognised

[gpstevens61]

I've got a single serial ATA hard drive which connects to the motherboard via a Fasttrak Raid connection. I'm trying to install Windows XP and I supply the correct (I think) Promise 378 drivers (from the CD supplied with the motherboard). But the system fails to complete the install and crashes. I've checked all the cables and they seem fine. Any suggestions welcome. Regards Greg

[confus-ed]

Hi greg & welcome to wd forums.

AFAIK you can only add extra drivers for raid & sata devices to winows setup by pressing f6 (when it prompts) from a floppy disk & its very annoying that motherboard manufacturers & makers of add in controller cards have this stupid idea of supplying them on a cd (infact its very annoying that windows setup even though being run from a cd won't allow it as a source for extra drivers !!), very deceptive if you haven't done it zillions of times to know that they want you to make a floppy & the cd is for installation inside windows ! ..

(often there's a little util on these motherboard disks that let you boot from them & make the necessary disk if you haven't got a working windoze machine )

[gpstevens61]

Yes I've created a floppy and supplied fasttx2k.sys which seems to get accepted although the system still crashes at the end of the install of Windows XP.

[MobilePCPhysician]

Whenever we have a problem like that, we use a sata to ide converter. Install xp, install the drivers for the raid. Shut it down and move the drive to the sata raid. reboot. Works like a charm.

You sure you have the bios set correctly? Boot order? Raid set to boot?

[gpstevens61]

I've tried setting the BIOS to IDE instead of Raid and supplying a different ATA driver but I get the same results (blue screen crash at the end of the WinXP install). I also have the option in my Bios to disable the Promise controller. I haven't tried that but may try it later.

I don't think it's hardware as the machine was fine recently. I only tried to re-install WinXP because the system checkpoint and restore functions seemed to have been deleted (virus?). I am happy to delete all the files on the hard drive (if I could!) to fix this.

Other things I can think of are;
1)The Bios or Raid Bios have got corrupted.
2)The very first crash message I got was about a file called vobid.sys which is part of Pinnacle's setup and I need to find a way to delete this file (this is based off reading similar problems other people have had; "http://www.mcse.ms/archive65-2004-2-434150.html"
3) Maybe it is a physical problem with cables, CMOS battery etc .

[confus-ed]

Oh I'm confus-ed now .. why is anybody at all mentioning RAID ? - we've only got one disk, so we shouldn't have any raid at all ..

Any 'raid options' want to be off !

[gpstevens61]

I don't know why it's set up this way, maybe the manufacturer (a small UK outfit called Evesham) configure everything as if it had several physical drives for simplicity.....

Below I've pasted part of a system info text file I made last year (when it was working fine).

I will try and totally disable RAID later.

[Disks]

Item Value
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model Promise 1+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk Device
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 2
SCSI Target ID 0
Sectors/Track 63
Size 233.76 GB (250,994,419,200 bytes)
Total Cylinders 30,515
Total Sectors 490,223,475
Total Tracks 7,781,325
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size 233.76 GB (250,994,386,944 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes

[SCSI]

Item Value
Name WinXP Promise FastTrak 378 (tm) Controller
Manufacturer Promise Technology
Status OK
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_105A&DEV_3373&SUBSYS_6619105A&REV_02\4&20D 92CA0&0&4050
I/O Port 0x0000DCC0-0x0000DCFF
I/O Port 0x0000DCB0-0x0000DCBF
I/O Port 0x0000DC00-0x0000DC7F
Memory Address 0xFF5FE000-0xFF5FEFFF
Memory Address 0xFF5C0000-0xFF5DFFFF
IRQ Channel IRQ 19
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\fasttx2k.sys ( 1.00.1.37, 156.00 KB (159,744 bytes), 20/10/2003 18:16)

Name WinXP Promise RAID Console SCSI Processor Device
Manufacturer Promise Technology
Status OK
PNP Device ID SCSI\PROCESSOR&VEN_PROMISE&PROD_RAID_CONSOLE&REV_1 .00\5&28792A0F&0&040

[gpstevens61]

When I disable the Promise controller it appears to install then fails at the end as it says it cannot find a hard drive. If I enable the Promise Controller I can set it to IDE or Raid, then either way if it will load XP and I can supply the drivers from a floppy but it then crashes on starting XP with a blue screen and "BAD_POOL_CALLER".

Could I create a floppy to boot the whole thing to Dos? If I could then I could check to see if this Vobid.sys file is still around.

[confus-ed]

So now I'm getting really confus-ed indeed, vobid.sys is usually associated as the 'burning engine' for pinnacle easy dvd (you said this earlier when I look back) - I kind of assumed we'd started from formatted, but are we infact doing some 'repair' or 'over the top' type install ? (otherwise there's like a zillion threads saying this is a known issue, & you need somehow to get rid of any pinnacle installation first)

[gpstevens61]

Sorry, to clarify. I realised a week or so ago that my copy of XP had all the restore point stuff disabled and I couldn't switch it back on (I hadn't turned it off either!). I suspect some sort of virus but nothing else seemed affected so I tried to re-install XP. Unfortunately it crashed with the Vobid.sys message and ever since I have been trying to get the machine to boot and continue the re-install or delete it and start the re-install again. I don't know if Vobid.sys is the real problem today but it's a prime suspect for me. I just don't know how to get to a CMD prompt to check its existance out....

[confus-ed]

So we've clarified now that this is a re-install, can you clarify if pinnicle 'anything' has been on this machine ? (apparently vobid.sys covers a few products) .. if it has I wouldn't bother searching, it'll be there somewhere's in your startup files else there wouldn't be an error about it ..

What the hell you can do about it though, is another matter entirely !

I think the first thing to do is find your windows system disk & boot from that, that'll get us to recovery console (a bit like a dos environment but not quite, & just incase you've never done this before ;- Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console ) from there we can either try a repair of the repair (it'll probably just repeat), zap the 'cocked up repair' (probably this is gonna fix it, but bye bye files ) or you can try & find any instances of vobid.sys by using console & see if that does it (I'm taking a flying guess that this'll cure it, but its better than zapping everything methinks).

[gpstevens61]

Yes I've had Pinnacle on the machine. There's no data on the machine I can't recover so am happy to reformat whatever...

Am going to go home and try console on it tonight (I'm in England)

[gpstevens61]

I couldn't get the console to work, the XP system disk says there's a partially installed version and takes me to the same options I've described below to either install afresh => BAD_POOL_CALLER or repair => BAD_POOL_CALLER.

[street1]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994>You mentioned booting from Floppy.This site has a boot disk set for Winxp.

[confus-ed]

install afresh => BAD_POOL_CALLER or repair => BAD_POOL_CALLER.

I can understand a repair doing that (it just did it before) but are you now telling me that you are still getting the same having formatted first?

btw street he doesn't need any bootdisks, when he siad 'didn't work' earlier he was meaning he couldn't fix it that way, he already has a windoze system cd from which to boot