- Feb 20, 2009
- 61
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So I have my OS on a Western Digital VelociRaptor drive (don't have the exact model, its one of the WD3000's, but model shouldn't really matter for this question) and in the last few months I've started getting errors on startup saying not boot device found. If I go into the bios setup it isn't detecting my main drive. But after a random number of restarts it will find it and boot up. I've done all the basic tests, different SATA port, different SATA cable, messed with all the BIOS options. All evidence points to a bad drive (my other two drives area always detected). But the weird thing is once it gets started up it never fails.
I'm in the process of looking for a new drive (I've been very low on money for a while so I was just keeping a good backup and making this work as long as I could but its getting bad enough I'll need a new one), but I'm still curious about why the drive only fails on startup (maybe 30 times in a row or more at its worst) but never fails once started. Is this a common way for drives to fail? Or is there something I could do to fix the startup problem (I doubt it but worth asking)?
P.S. For a while when it wouldn't show up in the BIOS I could find it by loading my Windows 7 disk and going to DISKPART in command prompt. It would show up there, then I could set it as active and everything would work, but recently this stopped working too. Maybe it was just luck that it showed up when I loaded the Windows 7 disk, I'm not really sure.
I'm in the process of looking for a new drive (I've been very low on money for a while so I was just keeping a good backup and making this work as long as I could but its getting bad enough I'll need a new one), but I'm still curious about why the drive only fails on startup (maybe 30 times in a row or more at its worst) but never fails once started. Is this a common way for drives to fail? Or is there something I could do to fix the startup problem (I doubt it but worth asking)?
P.S. For a while when it wouldn't show up in the BIOS I could find it by loading my Windows 7 disk and going to DISKPART in command prompt. It would show up there, then I could set it as active and everything would work, but recently this stopped working too. Maybe it was just luck that it showed up when I loaded the Windows 7 disk, I'm not really sure.
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