Hey guys, I've been having a lot of trouble with the boot drive disappearing on my gaming desktop. It has happened twice now: 1st time-About 2-3 weeks ago, I was in the middle of an MWO game and everything went still. I could alt tab out to the desktop, but nothing responded to me there. I couldn't even use the shut down button or get the task manager to come up. I did a hard reset, the computer rebooted but would not recognize the hard drive and wanted me to boot from a cd. I entered bios, only to find that the drive did not exist there. HOwever, after resetting the hard drive would reappear for a bit randomly, but then crash before windows could load. I figured the most likely fix was to replace the hard drive, so I went over to my local microcenter and bought a Toshiba 1TB drive to replace my 5 month old WD Blue 1TB. The salesman was a little shocked that I had a WD harddrive crash after that short a period of time, apparently their QC is usually better than that. When I got home, the computer rebooted fine. Everything worked again. I ran every windows and WD hard drive diagnostic I could find, and everything with the drive checked out okay. However, just to be safe, I imaged the HD and cloned it onto the new Toshiba drive. I then reformatted the older WD drive and have been using it for a storage drive for downloadable games (ie MWO, Neverwinter, Steam, etc) because I knew I could get all that stuff back if the drive crashed on me. Incident number 2: Yesterday my computer freezes up again. This time I get an error message "windows.exe has unexpectedly shut down". I don't think I got this message last time, but I also waited longer this time around. I do a hard reset, and the computer refuses to boot saying it can't find an OS on the specified drive. The problem is that it is looking at the old hard drive which is no longer the system drive. I go into BIOS and re order the boot drives so that it will actually boot from the Toshiba drive which is now my systems disk. It tries to reboot, but goes to a blinking cursor (kind of like back in the DOS days) which drops down two lines after a few seconds, blinks some more, and then pulls up a message saying "cannot load operating system". So here's my question: What the bloody hell is going on? Options I've thought of, (some of which I might be able to fix but I am not sure how to test): A. Corrupted Windows install. The second time around the Bios suggests there is nothing wrong with the 2 week old toshiba hd, so it could be a corrupted OS because I mirrored the old one rather than do a fresh install B. Something wrong with the hd controller (because it doesn't seem to be the disks themselves) or the Bios (which keeps trying to switch the boot order on me, even though I just saved bios settings telling the machine to read from the Toshiba disk first). I believe that both of these issues might require a new motherboard, but I would really love to know that that is the problem before I spend the money and time to replace the mb. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions about what might be going wrong, how to diagnose the problem, or how to fix it, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks, BlackJackRaider
If your BIOS can't even find the HD or is having problems keeping it straight I doubt its Windows, that seems to be a lower level issue than the OS. Did you try changing the connecting cables to the HD and the mobo? Your cables could be faulty if you're having sporadic detection issues... either that or your mobo is jacked.
