ack! My system just died!

[drunkclever]

Asus black pearl
850 psu
Q6600
Water cooled
8gb ram ocz reapers

I took my little computer out and cleaned it. I took all the juice out and out some new in it. Let it run for 6 hours... (just the cooling system) blah blah...

Looked carefully for leaks. Nada.

Turned it on and started playing bf3. After about 3 and a half hours my computer shuts down.... and then turns back on... it says

primary master drive- ATAPI incompatible
Press F1 to resume

Never seen this before.... any care to shed some light?

[Mr.Scott]

Off the top of my head I'd say bad HD.

[drunkclever]

Well my primary is a m4 ssd or c4 I forgot...

And 2 1.5 tb hhds. I am going to disconnect the ssd and connect the other 2... and if I have to I will reinstall windows. Its going to have to wait until next week.

[PommieB]

Try recycling the ssd drive, you'll find the instructions on the crucial forum.

[drunkclever]

Recycle... I'll have to look into that. I have a lot of sensitive information on that ssd... what would happen to it?

[prudhomb]

Originally Posted by drunkclever

Recycle... I'll have to look into that. I have a lot of sensitive information on that ssd... what would happen to it?

always back up your porn that way you dont have to worry about loosing it.

[Deluded]

Try to reset BIOS. If still same issue, bad HDD.

[drunkclever]

There's a lot to move to do a reset. I can get into the bios utility. I loaded default values, and see my SSD and my optical drive.... and 1 of the hhd.

When I let it load it processes up to where there is a cursor... and then it just stay there flashing. I am thinking that maybe boot manager was on that other drive... the one that probably died. I am looking for my CD to see if it will help or my siren CD that has a micro windows xp.

I am running out of time... got to sleep soon.

[DarkTower87]

If it ends up being a bad HDD you can connect the SSD to another computer running Windows and use Recuva to recover the data, even if it doesnt show up in My Computer it is still usually recoverable.

Additional Comment:

Also
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812232002

you'll have to find something like this from a retailer.

[jbmcmillan]

Originally Posted by drunkclever

There's a lot to move to do a reset. I can get into the bios utility. I loaded default values, and see my SSD and my optical drive.... and 1 of the hhd.

When I let it load it processes up to where there is a cursor... and then it just stay there flashing. I am thinking that maybe boot manager was on that other drive... the one that probably died. I am looking for my CD to see if it will help or my siren CD that has a micro windows xp.

I am running out of time... got to sleep soon.

If you are running 7 then boot with the dvd and it will have a repair option if that is the case where the boot files were on the other drive.I have used this successfully a few times.

[PommieB]

d suggest next time you install win7, disconnect all the remaining drives except the one you intend to use as the OS drive. Run the repair you might be lucky, if not try to get the lost data off the ssd drive and do a clean install. You will need to restore the ssd to a new state prior to the install.

[Playap0wnr]

My hard drive (secondary, thank god) just bit the dust too. Curse you technology!!!

[drunkclever]

... update

...so I took another last OK at my connections. I had 1 sata power cable disconnected.
I loaded my disk in. But its to no avail... does not boot up at all. I mean... it loads as far as BIOS will go but that pesky invalid ATAPI thingy is still there.


Edit: in the bios all drives are present.

[PommieB]

Is this the ssd drive that's still giving problems, what your saying is the computer loads the bios ok, but you get an error prior to loading the OS, I've seen this happening with optical drives that have gone bad, try disconnecting the optical drive, usually if the bios shows no errors and recognizes all the drives the error you may encounter is no media present or not able to find OS, which usually means there's a problem with the OS drive, which could be bad or loose connections or a failing hard drive.

What exactly are you trying to do ? re-install win7 or get the computer to boot into win7. I'm afraid Atapi thingy doesn't mean a great deal except you have problems with disk drives or optical drives, they both use the atapi protocol, you need to unplug everything external except the power, disconnect all disk drives except the OS drive including the optical drive, you don't need it to boot into the OS.

You could also try using a conventional disk drive as a OS drive and see if you can install windows onto it, if your still getting the Atapi error then it's not the disk drives at fault, the fault might be with the motherboard.

Personally I would have pulled the whole computer apart and re-built to a minimum spec, checking all connections thoroughly as I went.

[drunkclever]

OK. I will have to try that tomorrow or next week.. ran out of time again. LoL. Maybe they will let me out of work early and I can get down to business. Thank you for the reply... and the suggestions.

Edit: I just want find out what exactly is wrong then depending on which drive it is either replace it or get my data out then replace. My ssd drive contains memories of my son. I miss him so much. I need those vids and pics. I just don't have the time or money... which really really sucks.

Edit:.. I guess I can get a little drive at best buy and install windows on it... then go from there... adding another drive until the culprit comes to light?

[PommieB]

Thought you might have a spare drive that you could test it with, ssd drives are not like conventional drives if they stop working, it can be difficult and expensive to recover the data, with any drive you need to be backed up regardless whether your using a ssd or not, I use ssd drives in my laptop and I clone the C: drive every so often to a similar sized conventional disk drive, if I get problems I can swap the drives knowing that the cloned drive is fully operational and can also be a back-up, if I swap out the drives and the computer still doesn't work then the problems not with the ssd drive or win7, I've had to do this on a couple of occasions, both times the problem was with windows not hardware and I was able to clone over the C: partition on the conventional drive, back to the ssd drive. It's also useful in updating the ssd's firmware, I can do that using the cloned conventional drive as the OS drive.

I should note that on both occasions I was unable to get into windows via safe mode and using the system disk to do a repair didn't work either, it turned out that the windows boot files on both occasions were corrupted by bad software.

Have you got a second computer to test the ssd drive as a data drive, you can do this with a docking station or a 2 1/2 external drive via a usb connection. I am running a single computer these days, I have no way of testing anything without the cloned copy.

If you intend to repair your own computers you need the ability to test the parts.

Here is an explanation of power recyling an ssd drive if the drive is no longer recognized in the bios.

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St...4GB/td-p/63835

[hostage67]

The error is pointing to your HD, but if your HD is otherwise working well you may want to consider testing your RAM.

When my OCZ ram went bad I was getting all sorts of random errors pointing at different random components in my PC (anything but the actual ram). Needless to say once the offending RAM was removed, the PC has worked fine. When you test your RAM make sure you are doing the advanced or extended tests, not just the basic tests. The RAM can be bad and still pass the basic testing.

[drunkclever]

Yeah.. my computer is fixed.

I did recently purchase some more ram. I took it out and still received the HD error. Reseated all connection. Error still present. After numerous tries I decided to check the settings for all the drives....

1.5 TB- P2
3.2 TB- P0
SSD- P6

So I reordered them correctly. My boot which is my SSD is now in P0... and so on and so forth. I then went into each drives settings and changed that to auto.
Bam. Computer back online.

Something happened that changed the settings in my bios.

Thanks for everyone's help!!!

[PommieB]

That's why we continually tell people to connect the ssd to the first connector ( P0 ), motherboards when turned on check for a boot partition starting with the first native connector, some older boards may even check the IDE connectors before the sata connections.