SATA Drive Seems to have gone missing

mattdp

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Apr 14, 2005
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Hi,

Got a system based around a Gigabyte K8NF-9 Motherboard. Once I'd set it up it booted really nicely the first few times. However, after a while it seemed to hit an intermittent error where the windows boot would take aaaaages and then just hang. It was pretty rare though, so I ignored it.

Then one day it started doing this on every boot. If you reset it'd look to be loading as normal but then just before it entered the windows boot screen the following error would come up:
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable.
PXE-M0F: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent.

On a first boot (when it normally tries to start Windows) the SATA drive is registered at Channel 3 in the BIOS. But after the first crash, looking in the BIOS, my SATA drive seems to have gone missing from the list of devices. Furthermore, the channel it was installed on searches for a long time when you try to auto-detect from the BIOS but doesn't find anything. I'm scared this might mean that the HDD has corrupted.

Now I've looked on the internet for this error and some of the common causes include:
* device attempting to boot from a LAN (I've set HDD to be primary boot agent, so it shouldn't be this)
* Disabling RAID in the BIOS leaving only IDE/SATA switched on - I'd already done this.
* Problems with the jumpers - but if it was this it'd never have worked ib the first place right?

So anyone suggest any other problems? Could it be something like a loose cable? I'm really concerned that there might be a problem with the HDD and I'll have lost some really important data.
 

shadowduck

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Jan 24, 2006
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SATA hard drives don't have jumpers, every drive is a master on its own channel. So that's not your problem.

Turn on S.M.A.R.T in your BIOS and see if you get S.M.A.R.T. errors. If you do, the drive is bad and will fail at anytime.

Otherwise: (in the order given)
Check for loose data cable/power cable
Run the drive makers utility on the drive and test it- if it fails the drive is bad.
Replace the cables

Still have problems:
Try a different SATA port

Still have problems:
Replace the drive.