AtomicInternet Archived News

Thursday morning I went to startup my computer and got halfway through when it rebooted itself. Starts up again with the "Windows did not start properly" menu. No matter what I chose it kept choking halfway into the boot cycle. Since Windows XP doesn't natively support Serial ATA I have to load a driver during setup. Since I don't have a floppy drive, and it only reads drivers from floppies this is slightly inconvienient. After I get the driver loaded, setup says my partitions are of the "RAW" format and it can't read them. At this point I've spent almost two hours trying to fix it and was more than late for work. I also have a sneaking suspicion the drive is completely hosed. Fast forward to tonight: I bring the drive over to Stavos house since he has a working computer with a Serial ATA interface. Hooked up my drive, ran scandisk, and voila, all better. My theory is the drive got overheated, but it could have just been a random fluke. If it happens again I'm saying farewell to Serial ATA and going back to good old EIDE. I included the checkdisk error below in case anyone else experiences this:

A disk check has been scheduled. Windows will now check the disk. The attribute of type 0x80 and instance tag 0x0 in file 0xc9f has allocated length of 0x1000 instead of 0x1c5000. Deleted corrupt attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 3231. Unable to locate attribute with instance tag 0x0 and segment reference 0x2000000005a7d. The expected attribute type is 0x80. Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, "") from file record segment 23165.