Hi all

I have a friend who has just built a PC system with 2 SATA drives. He installed Win XP and all was ok for a few days. After a few days of running with no problems he booted the PC and got the following errors:

<windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Cannot start windows, missing or corrupt file, please replace or repair.

After rebooting all was ok until a few days later when he got the same message again on startup. We checked in the system32 directory and the file was there. Also the file could'nt have been corrupt because when rebooted XP loaded without problems. We assumed that this might be the result of a faulty disk so he swaped the disk for an identical one (Segate ATA, 160 gig) and reinstalled XP on it. One again all was ok for a day or so and then suddenly when starting the PC one morning he got the following error message:-

A disk read error has ocurred, Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart.

He restarted and so far today all is ok. We realise the chances of 2 disks being faulty is very remote. I am wondering if this is something to do with using SATA disks. The technollogy is still very new.

Does anyone have any idea what could have caused these error messages, bearing in mind that in both instances, they occurred just after a fresh install?

Any help greatly appreciated
Dan hawkes

A Little more info is needed to get started on this one.

How are the drives configured ?
Raid 0, 1 ???

Are the connectors good and the cables high quality ?

Are they ( the Drives ) getting the power they need for the P/S ?

Are they spinning up completely before the load error ?

Hmmm. I think Rick nailed it with his last question. Sounds like the HD's have not fully initialized before they start to load Windows. The problem is not unique to SATA controllers.

Try the following things taken from the PC guide. The main thing is to slow down the boot process to allow the HD to initialize completely:

"Some systems have a BIOS setting to allow you to delay the booting of the hard disk by several seconds to alleviate this problem. If you have a boot delay setting then enable it and see if that fixes the problem.
Use other BIOS settings to make the initial boot-up take longer. For example, many BIOSes have a "Quick Boot" setting that speeds up the boot process by skipping some of the power-on tests. Disabling this will make the bootup take longer. Enabling "Floppy Drive Seek" will also cause the boot to take a few seconds longer. There may be other options as well, depending on your system."

I have one computer with this problem. When I push the power on button, several seconds later I push the reset button (pain in the a$$ but it works).

I think the problem has become worse as computers have increased in speed.

I know some MSI-mobo's have troubles detecting SATA-HDD's. If your mobo is an MSI, that might be it and it's easily :rolleyes: fixed through a bios flash :eek: :eek: :eek:

If your mobo is NOT an MSI, disregard this comment :D