Disappearing hard drive..

[clive r]

I've just put together a new system based around an Abit AT8 board, and spent a good few hours on an install the other night. All was going well, and I was gawping at Oblivion when I decided to try a small overclock using the Abit utility. I gave it 10%, it rebooted, and.. ... nothing, no operating system.

I've checked with my partition manager and my c drive is no longer formatted!

I know I don't have a hope of recovering it, which isn't a big deal at this stage, but wtf?

The d drive with my data on is still there (on the same physical hard drive). I've cleared the cmos and the bios loads ok. I had AVG running so i dont think it was a virus.

Before I start again, anyone got an idea what could have happened?

Specs are: Abit AT8, Opteron146, Ballistix 3200 512mb x2, Gigabyte X800XL, Samsung P120 80gb Sata, XP Pro

 

[WC Annihilus]

Hmm... Did you remember to lock the PCI frequency? If not, it would have gone up when you overclocked and hard drives are very sensitive to it. Besides that, I don't really know (not enough experience, we'll see what others think)

 

[XinFamousX101]

check the bios under boot priarity...

also check your raid controller

when this happened to me, it was because my mobo resets the bios every 5 days from ocing because it is intel and it does everything to prevent u from overclocking...

and when my bios was reseted, the rail controller was off and my computer was not detecting my os harddrive..

and also define partition manger

 

[Tec]

I believe the main cause was, damage to MFT which is Master File Table, MFT keeps track of everything file related on the disk , without it disk would look as if its not formatted at all. This could happen in many ways , disk programs , disk checking utilities , overclocking , viruses etc. You can rebuild the MFT if you want to recover any files other then that just format it and reinstall.

 

[clive r]

I believe the main cause was, damage to MFT which is Master File Table, MFT keeps track of everything file related on the disk , without it disk would look as if its not formatted at all. This could happen in many ways , disk programs , disk checking utilities , overclocking , viruses etc. You can rebuild the MFT if you want to recover any files other then that just format it and reinstall.

Thanks, yes that makes sense now. Wish I could pin down exactly how it happened though.

I don't need to recover any files as I keep my stuff on a separate fat32 partition which was untouched (and it's all backed up elsewhere). This also tells me it wasn't a disk problem.

I'm not using raid as that's another can of worms with this board.

How would I go about rebuilding the MFT (could come in useful!)?

 

[WC Annihilus]

As I said, did you remember to lock your PCI frequency? That could have corrupted part of it... (well, I dunno if it would only corrupt part of it <shrugs>)

AGP/PCI Lock

The AGP and PCI Bus' are tied together on all motherboards that I know of. They are also derived from the FSB (Or HTT in the case of AMD) frequency by a divider. NVidia NForce chipsets have whats called a PCI/AGP Lock. This keeps your PCI and AGP Bus at a constant speed no matter what your HTT bus is. This is CRITICAL. If your PCI bus is too fast, you WILL corrupt hard drive data. If your AGP Bus is too fast, you WILL have Video problems. Via Chipsts have been known to have Faulty PCI locks. This appears to be corrected in the KT800 Pro Chipset, but KT800 and below SHOW a PCI Lock in most bios's but it doesnt do much... This is a Primary reason why overclockers stay away from these boards.

 

[FragTek]

Some mobo's don't feature a PCI lock feature but you still have a shot of having a few locked SATA ports. Usually SATA ports 1/2 are unlocked, try moving your HD to 3 or 4 (normally on a locked frequency). This is what was stopping me from hitting 2.8ghz on my old 3000+ Winnie, it was getting stuck @ about 2.3ghz and then corrupting files on my HD.

A little research showed that on my board SATA 1/2 were unlocked and 3/4 were locked. I didn't have a feature in the BIOS to lock my PCI bus.

 

[WC Annihilus]

He has an Abit board man... Despite their recent falling, I'm sure it at least has a PCI Lock

 

[clive r]

As I said, did you remember to lock your PCI frequency?

Erm, no. My overclocking attempt was using the Abit overclocking software, so I don't know exactly what it did to be honest.

Looking in the bios the pcie clock is adjustable separately from the cpu clock, so I assume this is what we're talking about here?

There's actually more options in the bios than I can shake whole bundle of sticks at.

The RD480 chipset is supposed to be a real powerhouse, but I believe there have been some issues. Perhaps I just experienced one. Ho hum.