Renzatic on 17/2/2010 at 03:24

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So here I am, upgrading the Windows 7 RC to Professional 64. Things seemed pretty good at first, I slapped the disc in, reformatted my drives, and let it run while I went downstairs to watch Lost. It's when I came back upstairs to check on the progress when things got weird.

It was at the pre-post splash, you know, the memory test, primary and secondary masters, ect...things looked normal, cept for the fact it was just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing. I hit ctrl-alt-del and restart the comp, it goes through the memory test, and reads the drives...and I see it's detecting my HDD as 3rd primary then doing nothing at all. Weird, so I hit F2 to go into the bios. Nope, it says it's loading it up, but doesn't do anything. It just sits there. Boot menu? Says it's loading it up, but...well, same thing. The only way I can get into the bios is to unhook the harddrive completely. From there, it reads the DVD-rom drive as usual, doesn't see an attached HDD, then then just goes in the bios as usual.

So I try switching channels. in SATA2 it's reading it as the 4th primary, my SATAII channel, 5th primary, and they all still freeze. As long as the HDD is hooked up and getting power, it will not let me go to the bios. And it's not even a freeze exactly, it's just...biding it's time, not doing anything.

This is the weirdest computer problem I've seen in my entire life, bar none. I am stumped. I mean the bios still detects the drive, gives me it's make and model and everything in the pre-post splash, but it never gets beyond that. It could be an MBR issue, but wouldn't that at least post before erroring out? And why did it just happen to do this after a reformat?

Anyone have any idea what I can do here? So far, I haven't managed to dig up any information online, I'm just here taking wild guesses and seeing what I come up with. I could use some help.

edit: I'm gonna say either both my harddrives have died on me simultaneously, or my onboard sata controller is down. I can't even boot into linux on the other harddrive.

Damn, I'm gonna have to get a new computer for sure now. It couldn't have come at a worse time, either. :(

Renzatic on 17/2/2010 at 17:18

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Yup. The second cable managed to boot slightly farther on the linux drive (I saw the little Ubuntu logo for like 2 seconds before it said it couldn't mount the file system), but didn't make a bit of difference on the windows drive.

It's possible I could have two bad SATA cables, and I'll try and track down a third just for the sake of testing it out. But to think that two drives or two cables have managed to go bad on me all at the same time seems a little unlikely. My best guess is the mobo, which would actually explain why I've had so many drives die on me these last couple of years. It could've been slightly flaky since I bought the thing, and only now decided to flake out completely.

I think my best bet at this point is to either do my upgrade a little early, or buy an old Socket 939 mobo and switch it out.

Briareos H on 18/2/2010 at 21:20

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One of my drives just started doing the exact same thing. Obviously, the drive which contained all my photos, writings and gf's art since 2002. Oh boy.

Renzatic on 19/2/2010 at 21:12

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Yup. Always back your crap up. Hard drives are fickle, stupid things.

Also I'm still stuck on my laptop, and it looks like I'll be stuck on it til late April/early July. :(