Win7 Hanging on Boot, ?Marvell Driver Problem

[Chrishazle]

I'm having seven bells of nightmare with my PC, hoping someone can help.

Due to continual freezing, I ended up doing a clean reinstall of Win7 Home Premium yesterday - and was surprised when, after the BIOS recognised both physical hard drives, Win only saw the C drive - and at 356Gig rather than the 250 I think it was - but did not see the d partition of that drive or the E partition of the second HDD.

So - got Win7 in, plus Kaspersky, Skype, internet connection, and of course there was a raft of Win7 updates to download - so I went for all the important ones (excluding IE, which I don't use) and most of the recommended ones, including I think a Marvell update for the IDE interface Sata 2 controller.

Turned the machine on this morning, it gets to the black windows screen with the 4 cloured blobs - and there it hangs. Can't get any further even trying safe mode or booting from the Win7 DVD (which is genuine!).

Thankfully wife's laptop is fine. Searching the internet I found reports of others having the same problem caused by updating Marvell's SATA/RAID driver. Great - but I can't get into windows to do a driver roll-back!

I have been able to boot the machine using my Kaspersky disc as a rescue disc, have updated scanned - no threats etc found - but can't do anything else.

Any ideas how I can sort this?

Many TIA!

 

[Chrishazle]

A quick update - I seem to have found a solution of sorts.

From t'internet I found a forum thread about resetting the SATA in the BIOS from whatever to ACHI (or something similar), so did that - and the machine booted from the hard drive, found the primary drive - which is in fact a 400Gig Samsung, so pre re-installation of Win 7 it was partitioned either 150/250 (I'm pretty sure that was how I did it) or 200/200. So, my D drive is history, but at least it's backed up on my 1TB USB drive so all is not lost.

Still no sign of the other HDD - a 500Gig Maxtor. More Googling, downloaded Seagate's (who own Maxtor now) Seatools for DOS, found that the Maxtor HDD was toast, many bad sectors that could not be repaired - hence the non-availability in Win 7. I'm pretty sure most of not all of the stuff on the Maxtor is also on the USB drive.

So, off to Ebuyer for a new 1TB internal HDD (I have free next day delivery from them!!). Once it's here I'll install that - just have to decide whether to have it as primary and re-install the OS on it (partitioned, of course!) or install it as the secondary.