Another problem on a prebuilt

I have here a Packard Bell IXtreme 6092 that is in a boot-reset loop on normal and Safe Mode boots.
Selecting Last known good config doesn't help.
Turning off the auto-restart will gice me a BSOD error pointing to either hard drive or filesystem corruption.

Now, given that this machine will try and boot every time, why would the hard drive not appear in BartPE or Spinrite?
I just don't understand why this should be so.

The machine actually has a 5yr extended warranty and I'll be recommending that the owner get PB to fix for free, but I'd just like to know what's up with the damned thing.

HDD failure? Cause both BartPE or Spinrite don't need a HDD to work.

I know they don't need a HDD to run because I have them on CD, but they should be able to see any hardware that's available at boot time, surely.

If the drive is connected via a Sata controller which does not give standard IDE appearance (for instance Silicon Image Sata controllers) then it probably won't appear in those utilities. Since that sort of chip makes the drives appear as SCSI devices loading ASPI drivers may give you access.

However, if you give details of the BSOD it may be possible to diagnose the fault.

hi, Is it a USB harddisk we are talking about?

quote

At present, SpinRite (6.0) doesn't support USB drives when booting from floppy unless you manually add DOS drivers to the disk; that ability, too, is likely to be further addressed in an upcoming version

end quote

This drive is Master on the Primary IDE channel with no slave.
I disconnected both optical drives on the Secondary channel just in case and it had no effect.

BSOD details:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
STOP 0xED
0x82A60030, 0xC0000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000

M$ KB says run checkdisk from the Recovery Console but it BSODs trying to get into there. It would appear the likely problem is failing hard drive.

This is really moot since I'm recommending the owner get PB to warranty repair it, but I'd just like to know how the hell the drive is available to boot from but not in a PE or recovery program.
Bloody strange.