My Dell Optiplex 980 windows 7 desktop boot hard drive crashed during a power outage (with a surge protector and a UPS, go figure). I've tried all kinds of diagnostics on the drive, including the Western Digital diagnostic tool (via a boot diskette as well as through a Sata/usb cable on another computer), and they basically either can’t access the drive or say it has ‘too many errors’ to read. (500 GB Sata III Blue). If I put that drive in the desktop, the bios identifies the drive correctly, but the machine won’t even boot into the Windows installation disk (it loads the windows files and then just goes to a black screen).
I bought a new drive (WD 1TB blue) and have been attempting to recover a backup image onto the new drive. My imaging backup attempts failed (using EaseUS ToDo and Acronis) because it appears that it is not possible to recover an image saved from a 512 sector drive to a 4K drive, even if it has 512e emulation. (something to keep in mind, since I’m guessing this will be a very common situation).
When I put the new drive in the bay, the bios recognizes the drive. Because there is no OS, I used the Windows installation disk to get to a command prompt. But from there, I could not do anything with the drive. I took the drive out and formatted it via a Windows 7 SP1 laptop and a SATA/USB cable. I put two 500GB partitions on the drive and put some data on the drive.
When I put that drive back in the desktop, from the command prompt I can now access the C and D partitions, BUT they show as raw, with no data, and the partitions show as 38GB, not 500GB. I thought the problem could be that perhaps the windows installation disk (which I think might be running Windows PE?) from 2010 did not have the right drivers to access the 4K drive, so I tried to use a newer version of PE to boot to (3.0) and also tried to load updated Intel Sata drivers. After 3 hours of trying to follow the obtuse Microsoft and Dell instructions on adding drivers to PE, I gave up (you have to load an update before you can load the drivers, and it’s pretty complicated).
The CD works fine. I tried switching the new drive to the other SATA cable (although I didn’t try a new cable). I also tried taking out the bios battery. The default settings for the bios are ‘RAID on’ even though I was not using a RAID configuration. I’ve tried all the other bios drive settings (ACHI, IDE).
So my question is: could there be something wrong with my sata controller? It is looking like I’m going to have to reinstall windows, something I was really hoping to do (in 15+ years and 10 computers, I’ve never had to do this!) – with a satellite connection and limited bandwidth, just getting the updates will take weeks. But before I do, I want to make sure that it isn’t my controller that either fried the drive or is an issue. I also have not put my other working non-boot data drive in the machine for the same reason.
Many thanks for any advice.
I bought a new drive (WD 1TB blue) and have been attempting to recover a backup image onto the new drive. My imaging backup attempts failed (using EaseUS ToDo and Acronis) because it appears that it is not possible to recover an image saved from a 512 sector drive to a 4K drive, even if it has 512e emulation. (something to keep in mind, since I’m guessing this will be a very common situation).
When I put the new drive in the bay, the bios recognizes the drive. Because there is no OS, I used the Windows installation disk to get to a command prompt. But from there, I could not do anything with the drive. I took the drive out and formatted it via a Windows 7 SP1 laptop and a SATA/USB cable. I put two 500GB partitions on the drive and put some data on the drive.
When I put that drive back in the desktop, from the command prompt I can now access the C and D partitions, BUT they show as raw, with no data, and the partitions show as 38GB, not 500GB. I thought the problem could be that perhaps the windows installation disk (which I think might be running Windows PE?) from 2010 did not have the right drivers to access the 4K drive, so I tried to use a newer version of PE to boot to (3.0) and also tried to load updated Intel Sata drivers. After 3 hours of trying to follow the obtuse Microsoft and Dell instructions on adding drivers to PE, I gave up (you have to load an update before you can load the drivers, and it’s pretty complicated).
The CD works fine. I tried switching the new drive to the other SATA cable (although I didn’t try a new cable). I also tried taking out the bios battery. The default settings for the bios are ‘RAID on’ even though I was not using a RAID configuration. I’ve tried all the other bios drive settings (ACHI, IDE).
So my question is: could there be something wrong with my sata controller? It is looking like I’m going to have to reinstall windows, something I was really hoping to do (in 15+ years and 10 computers, I’ve never had to do this!) – with a satellite connection and limited bandwidth, just getting the updates will take weeks. But before I do, I want to make sure that it isn’t my controller that either fried the drive or is an issue. I also have not put my other working non-boot data drive in the machine for the same reason.
Many thanks for any advice.
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