Thread: Is my SATA drive corrupted?

Guys (and gals) I think I am in deep trouble.
A few days ago I left my PC working overnight (running Windows.... ), folding. In the morning, instead of discovering another completed WU, i found the good ol' BSOD. I cannot remember the exact stop error but I though it might be connected to the F@H program I had running. I then restarted the PC and it seemed like all was well. However, I started getting more and more BSOD and eventually I noticed that under information, it noted viamraid.dll which I am assuming is something to do with the SATA driver or another RAID utility.

After reading a snippet on line I decided, very, very foolishly to remove my RAID configuration tool. After that when I tried to start Windows I just got a BSOD. So, no more windows. Just to confirm that I did not remove the SATA driver, just the RAID configuration tool.

So, I thought, I do not mind re-installing as my system is really messy....
But even after installing to the original partition, including formating, I still get the BSOD. So I tried low level CHKDSK. When I try to go through Windows, I get the BSOD. When I try the 'Windows-start-time-Check' it just freezes at 41% of phase 4. So at the moment I can do very little with my precious 120GB SATA drive.

I since installed Windows on my spare IDE drive. There are no problems there. I have got the SATA drive visible and I can open the partitions to look at but as soon as I try to check the partitions I get..... you guessed it..... BSOD!

By the way, I never had any problem mounting and/or reading/writing from Linux....

So, my question is (I know it took a while to get there), as I cannot check the disk properly with windows, how to I find out whether I am having a problem with the disk or with the SATA controller? is there a command line program I can run from a floppy which will tell me if there is something wrong with my drive?

Thanks for reading through all this.....

Thanks guys....
I cannot find a new card for less than £20! Grrrrrrrrr
I saw a few on eBay but I so not have money to throw at some twaty eBayer.......