Over the weekend I formated my HDD’s and reinstalled Microsoft Win XP Pro, I operated the system for approximately 24 -36 hrs and tested for stability.
This morning, 5/15/2005, I installed Avast 4.7 and selected to run the boot time analyizer. It spent approximately 5-7 minutes processing and then re-booted my computer - at which time everything fell apart.
Now my BIOS can not see my C:\ drive (a maxtor HD) or my H:\ Drive (2 WD Raptors in Raid 1) and I am told that I have no HBA or HPA (not sure which) drives.
avast! certainly doesn’t do anything so low-level (I doubt such a thing would be possible with any ordinary software, actually).
If your BIOS cannot see your drives, it sounds like a hardware problem for sure. I’d suggest to check the connection of the drives, controller, drive modes in BIOS, etc.
I seem to have had the same problem, about 2 weeks age I installed the latest upgrade of Avast, it appeared in the bottom of my screen as a green pop up.
The next time I switched on after that the hard drive reported a disk error and would not start. I managed to get going again by using the computer setup and windows recovery program and rolling back a few days.
Yesterday (14.05.06) the computer would not switch on at all due to disk error, I have just taken it to PC world and they said that the hard drive is not readable and therefore requires reinstalling back to factory settings.
I do have the disks to do this, but would prefer not to.
Everything is connected properly. The process happened just as I explaned. I am willing to entertain any possible theory, but the fact remains that I experianced a complete dissabeling of my system during my first boot scan of Avast.
One thing I did not mention is that I was running a dual boot system.
Please help me understand what potentally happened during the boot sequence and what is the “HBA” refference.
I disconnected all HDD’s, started the computer, entered BIOS, Saved and Exited.
The computer POST’ed, cycled to the point of finding No - Bootable Media
Powered Down.
Re-connected all HDD’s, started the computer, entered BIOS, confirmed all drives, Saved and Exited.
The computer POST’ed, cycled to the point where I had to choose an OS. I selected my C:\ drive (the drive I installed AVAST on) and got the same error, “Hard Drive doesn’t support HPA” or something similar.
Anyway… Repeated steps above and then selected my Raid 1 configuration drive (x64) and the computer booted.
I think AVAST has corrupted my Boot.ini or some other type of ini file. What file(s) does (do) AVAST write to when running the first Boot scan?
There has to be something that has been corrupted.
I’m not sure what HPA exactly means, but it seems like some Gigabyte thingy (which sometimes causes problems - try google for “Hard drive doesn’t support HPA”). Maybe this link might help?
None, except for one or two log files in avast! installation folder.
Boot up your system with any Live linux (i prefer Slax, but you can use any).
If you can browse the drive it’s something to do with boot sector.
But if BIOS fails to detect any kind of HDD i’d say it’s most certanly a hardware problem.
I have solved the problem. Somehow, my boot.ini file was corrupted. Since I experianced the problem during the AVAST boot scan I associated the two events together.
Now that I know the answer, I am willing to admit that the action is probably coincidental.
Thanks for posting the ‘solution’… maybe you can ‘modify’ your first post in this thread and change the name of it as, fortunatelly, a major catastrophy become learning and experience 8)