Bios "sees" hard drive, but XP boot disk does not

[henryhoehandle]

I am working on a friends comp that will no longer boot to XP. It gets to the XP screen and the "night rider" bars keep moving, but that is as far as it goes. After 3 minutes or so, I get about 1 millisecond of a blue screen of death (way too fast to try to read) and then a re-boot. It will not boot to safe mode or anything else either. Here is the weird part: When I put in a XP boot cd to try to do a repair or a clean install. It says it cannot find any harddrives. I tried another known good harddrive (both serial ata) and same thing.
Asrock mb (p4v88). BIOS "sees" hard drives.

Is this a MB issue? Sounds like it to me. Maybe I need to flash the bios ?(clearing it didn't help)

 

[tb28w3]

Have you installed the drivers from a floppy disk for the motherboard. When I installed XP I always had to do that for a SATA drive. I think you push F6 when prompted in the setup program. I've now moved on to Vista and no problems yet.

 

[techgeek]

You don't mention what motherboard this is, or whether the HDD is SATA, but I will take a stab at it. If this system was working and now it's not, the SATA controller has most likely been switched to AHCI in the BIOS. AHCI (otherwise known as NCQ) requires drivers at the install of Windows (F6), they can't be added afterwards. Furthermore, I have seen this exact problem when AHCI is enabled in the BIOS after Windows is installed. It looks like it's going to boot, but then a BSOD. If this is the case, no harm done, just go into the BIOS and set it back and reboot.

 

[henryhoehandle]

Thanks for the info. Yes, the HDD is SATA. I will check the settings. I guess, then if it is not set to AHCI, I can (F6), load the drivers, then maybe do a repair on the OS drive?