My computer is experiencing some problems when I try to add a SATA hard disk drive. The motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9) has the usual two IDE connectors, both of which have the primary and secondary channels occupied with two hard disks, an optical drive, and a Zip drive. The motherboard also has eight SATA connectors, four of which are used by the on-board nVidia chipset. On the assumption that sooner or later one of the IDE channels will fail, I tried to connect a SATA hard drive, as a reserve, to one of the appropriate SATA connectors on the board. The BIOS correctly identified the new drive, but the system would not proceed to boot, displaying the following error message: “Windows could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot configuration problem: Did not properly generate ARC name for HAL and system paths. Please check the Windows documentation about ARC configuration options and your hardware reference manuals for additional information”. I cannot find either of these terms in the Windows Help files or in the manual that came with the system board. The system BIOS has never been updated, nor has the chipset. The computer is running Windows XP SP2. Can you help in getting the system to recognise the SATA hard drive?

This is certainly a complex error message, and I have done quite a bit of research on the problem to find an explanation. ARC stands for Advanced RISC Computing, which was an attempt at providing a standard for the base instruction set (i.e. low-level code which the computer and computer processor uses to operate). According to the reading which I have done, versions of Windows (including Windows XP) uses particular principles from ARC for naming boot devices, such as hard drives. This could be related to your problem, since it is about a boot device (the computer hard drive). HAL stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer, which is a layer that sits between the computer hardware and operating system kernel. The primary purpose of the HAL is to mask differences in the computer hardware from the operating system, allowing the operating system to work on many different hardware platforms and configurations without the need to modify the operating system code.

At this point you may be asking how the ARC and HAL relate to the problem being experienced. Taking this one step at a time, it seems that the computer has not correctly generated a name for your new SATA drive which can be recognised by the HAL. Having hardware not recognised by the HAL is a major problem, demonstrated when attempting to clone an installation of Windows XP built on a single-core computer (which uses the ACPI Uniprocessor PC HAL) onto a multi-core computer (which uses the ACPI Multiprocessor PC). In this situation, the computer will refuse to boot, and simply display the blue screen of death. This is because the operating system was built using a different HAL than it has been cloned onto. Your problem is not dissimilar, in that Windows does not appear to be recognising the SATA drive, does not know what to do, and is refusing to boot the computer. You might wonder why the computer just doesn’t ignore the error and complete booting. My educated guess is because Windows is unsure whether that drive is the boot drive containing the operating system, and does not know whether it should proceed with attempting to boot. It seems that it is not taking any chances, and is just refusing to boot the computer.

From the articles on the internet which I have read about other users experiencing similar problems, it seems that something within the BOOT.INI file is causing the problem. This could be due to the entry for your SATA hard drive being incorrect, or the addition of the SATA drive causing something to be mis-recognised with the existing entries. I am hesitant to recommend that you modify the BOOT.INI since things work correctly when the SATA drive is not connected, and only start to misbehave when the SATA drive is connected to the computer. Therefore, I am concerned that by changing the BOOT.INI we may actually make the situation worse, potentially resulting in the computer becoming completely unbootable.

In short, you could spend a very long time attempting to diagnose and fix this issue. Additionally, it will be very difficult to resolve this issue through correspondence rather than being in front of the computer. As such, the best suggestion I can offer is to backup all the data on your computer and then attempt a clean reinstallation of Windows XP. However, before embarking on this procedure I would strongly recommend that you update the computer BIOS and motherboard firmware. Looking on the Gigabyte website (www.gigabyte.com.au) there are several updates to the motherboard, with the latest update being released in October 2008. By updating the BIOS this should ensure that the problem is not related to your hardware and eliminate this as a potential cause of the problem. Once the BIOS is updated and you have backed-up any important data you wish to keep (as this process will result in all data on your computer being lost) commence the Windows reinstallation procedure. This should detect all devices, correctly install the SATA drive, and write a new BOOT.INI file as part of the installation process. Make sure that you have your new SATA hard drive connected before commencing the installation, to ensure this device is correctly detected.