Award Bios F13e Failsafe Defaults Corrupt Hd

[overclocker_man]

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte P965 S3 rev 1.0 mb and a Award F13e Bios. Lately I decided to overclock. In the Bios menu I chose the "Failsafe Default". This is an option the Bios. After confirming the Pc rebooted. I saw the following screens:

 

1 the startup screen with Energy-star icon, Bios type and version;

2 the list of PCI devices

 

Normally I then get a listing of my 2 Samsung SATAII (160GB) disks with an option to enter a menu. After that screen the Windows logo shows and the boot process begins. Instead the PCI listing menu stayed on the screen with a blinking cursor below.

 

I rebooted, went back into the Bios menu, saw that Fail safe defaults also set my boot device to Floppy (which I don't have). I reset this to 1st HD but still could not boot.

I rebooted into the Windows XP startup disk. The partition manager correctly found the 2 physical disks. But it only showed for 1 of them the (3) partitions. The other disk was unallocated. It used to have 3 partitions as well...

 

I started up from BartPE.

 

I used GetDataBack and had it scan the unrecognized HD. It found all my stuff there. GDB has no option to recover an unrecognized disk so I quit.

I used Active Patrition v5.1 to scan the unrecognized disk. After an hour of deep scanning it came up with 53 partitions. Among them were the 3 I lost. I fixed the boot record for 1 of them, the other 2 looked ok (iow their MBR was identical to the 2 copies).

 

When I wanted to recover the disk it reported it ws unable to recover the disk because it had to be initialized first via the Windows Administrative Tasks/Computer management console... No idea what that meant or how to do that if Windows cannot boot.

 

Still when I restart the bootdisk is not found.

 

After several days I reinstalled Windows on an empty partition. I intend to backup stuff from the unrecognized disk, repartition it and start all over again with installing apps, configuring windows. This is a PITA.

 

I wonder: why do these fail safe defaults corrupt my harddisk??? And why can't this disk be used while it's contents are still there and visible to utilities?

 

OS = XP Sp2

HD = SATAII, no Raid