Thanks for the reply, Tom, but as I tried to say, the machine hasn't been booting Win 7 even from the DVD drive! And this without any hard drive attached at all! Yet, as I said, it WOULD boot XP/DOS and (most of) linux ! I had disconnected all peripherals, extra drives, the video card, but this had no effect. I finally decided that it still had to be some kind of h/w problem, and thought about the BIOS...rootkit perhaps (I'm not sure if that could affect the BIOS, but...). I went to the board manufacturer's site, and downloaded a more recent ("more stable") version & re-flashed. However, Win7 STILL did not boot (off any medium). However, this time I noticed that Ubuntu (linux) did boot fully, i.e. with all menu items appearing. That CD, (about 5 years old) also offered a rather comprehensive memory testing routine, so I thought, "what the h...", and ran it and...
...turns out the my second 4gig strip of DDR3, in the upper address range (above 4096 MB) was having all kinds of problems with one of its bits! Now that I've pulled it from the system, it's back to working just fine (albeit with less memory for now) , booting the SSD with Win7 with no problem (after an auto repair)!
So, perhaps a lesson here is that some OS's, older ones in particular, will boot just (about) fine with a problem in the upper reaches of memory, while Win 7's winload process, at least, will choke! Funny, huh? And also I thought that the POST bios routine does a memory check as a matter of course, though perhaps this problem was a bit to subtle for it to diagnose (?)
I'm considering this "Case Closed"!
- Sammy
Tom Tancredi :
Okay slow down. Your responses with XP and Ubunto are because your BOOTING off the DVD/CD NOT the HDD. So this has nothing to do with the SSD. Now if you remove the SSD, and you have NO OTHER HARD DRIVES in the computer, there is NO WAY you get the Windows Booting logo, it is physically impossible.
So lets start from scratch, make sure the drives are hooked up properly. When you TURN ON the computer, press F2 or whatever it is to enter BIOS. What does it show for the drives?
Now reboot and watch what it does, once BIOS is showing start tapping F8, can you get into SAFE MODE. If you can, does it boot? If not then Windows itself is hosed (most likely) and your best solution is to use a DBAN CD to wipe the drive (SSD or HDD?), then install windows clean, then the drivers and software. IF it errors during any of this then the drive has failed. Now if you ONLY have a SSD, you may have run it down, they are known to have LOW read writes, and if you didn't turn off Virtual memory and other things, then you probably wore it out quickly.
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