Windows 8 prevents SSD/HDD from posting in bios, bios hangs with SSD/HDD attached, works if detached

chris1971

Distinguished
Jun 16, 2009
4
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18,510
Hi,

I have a weird situation:
Asus Maximus IV board with SSD / HDD windows 8.1 boot disk attached on intel SATA. Other boot disk with Windows 7. I cloned the SSD to a HDD.

After going into hibernate / sleep, on restart it hangs at posting the SSD in UEFI, just a black screen, HDDs are not recognized. Im booting via legacy BIOS, not UEFI. If I detach the win8 SSD and boot from another HDD into Windows 7, it boots fine.
If I attach the win8 SSD to a different PC, it boots fine. checked with pated magic and SSD and HDD are fully intact...
First I thought it is the SSD sleep/frozen issue and bought a HDD and cloned the working SSD image to the HDD.

Now I have the same error on the HDD, after shutting off the PC with HDD and power on, it hangs at boot, so it must be something on the disk in the boot partition that prevents my disks from posting in bios.

Would anyone have any clue how to fix this without a complete reinstall ?

best regards
buschi
 

durgesh86

Honorable
Jan 8, 2013
158
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10,760
Hi
I recently faced a similar issue. Turned out the power cable was faulty. So when i changed the power cable to a different one the system booted fine. Before that the system hanged at BIOS, did not recognize the HDD (not matter if it was IDE/AHCI etc) nothing worked. Check the PSU lines. and try interchanging or a different one.
 

bubbahotep

Distinguished
Nov 26, 2008
3
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18,510
its something that windows 8 writes on the partition. its not power, nor faulty drives... bcd rebuild didnt do it. I ended up reinstalling and will hope that this is fixed in windows 10.
 

bonou2

Reputable
Mar 8, 2014
67
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4,660
Try replacing both the Power and data SATA cables. If that doesn't work, try connecting the SSD/HDD with a different SATA port and see how that goes.
Also check that you have the BIOS proper setup (SATA Configuration settings).