D drive crashed, now computer won't boot - help!

Ceuper · Jul 2, 2015

I had my first experience with a hard disk crash yesterday and I need some assistance. Windows gave me the notice that my 1TB D drive was reporting an error. I immediately backed up the most important files to an external drive, and that seemed to work fine. About two hours later I was unable to access any files on the drive, but the rest of my computer appeared to be working normally. I tried running a chkdsk on D through command prompt but it returned an error saying the drive was RAW format and chkdsk couldn't be run.

I noticed at the time that when I restarted my system it took an abnormally long time to boot. It hung on the windows logo for about 5 minutes, and then took another couple of minutes to fully load. It also displayed a message before the windows logo saying Sec master hard disk: SMART status bad. The same thing happened this morning. Everything else seemed normal. Now this afternoon I tried to turn it on again, and the computer won't boot at all. Just a black screen after the BIOS page and then after a minute or two the windows startup error prompt. Startup recovery doesn't seem to do anything except hang on black.

I was under the impression that because the failure was in my D drive, it would not affect the computer otherwise. Anyone have an idea on what could be causing this? I want to do a fresh install of windows on a new SSD anyway, but before I do so I would like to try and get more files off of both the C and D drives. At this point I'm worried it was a virus rather than a real disk failure, and I'd like advice on what steps I should take from here. Thanks in advance.

Reyaz123 · Jul 2, 2015

When it fails the smart test, that drive is proven to be in bad condition. I highly doubt it is a virus

Programs like acronis boot image, could transfer the disc image to the new SSD (given that the drive is still functioning by then)

Create a recovery disc within Windows while you still can just in case

Ceuper · Jul 2, 2015

Reyaz123 :

Thank you for the reply. Does the SMART test check both drives? Because it was clear yesterday that the failing drive was D, which is not my boot drive. I could still start the computer and use it otherwise. Yet today I can't even get to the windows logo, so no chance to make a recovery disk. Is it normal for a non system hard drive to affect windows startup like that?

Reyaz123 · Jul 2, 2015

Ceuper :

If the D drive is a separate drive: From personal experience, if I removed that drive from the boot priority options in my bios the boot stopped having those issues

A separate drive wouldn't normally interfere with the primary drive. Remove the secondary drive from the pc and test if it boots fine

A program called seagate seatools can and will check individual hard drives with the smart scan, check it out
http://www.seagate.com/ca/en/support/downloads/seatools/

If the smart scan files on the second drive, replace it when you can

USAFRet · Jul 2, 2015

The other part of this may be the System Reserved partition. Depending on how the OS was installed and what was connected, that partition, which contains the boot info, may well exist on the now-dead D drive.

Resulting in no boot for you.

Ceuper · Jul 2, 2015

Reyaz123 :

Thanks for the suggestion, I was really hoping that would work. I went into BIOS and noticed that the boot order seemed messed up, and it had the D drive as first priority. So I switched them and tried again, and now I just get the error BOOTMGR is missing. I physically removed the D drive to be sure and its the same problem. I was also able to confirm that it is the D drive that the SMART scan is reporting bad, and that C is okay.

USAFRet: I've never heard of that but it sounds like it may be my problem. Perhaps my boot info was on the D drive all along and I'd never realized. Would explain why it was taking so long to load windows yesterday and why it has become worse today. If that's the case is my only option to do a fresh install of windows on a separate drive?

USAFRet · Jul 2, 2015

If you install Win 7 or 8 with more than one drive connected, the boot partition usually ends up on the other drive. If that drive dies...

(Some engineer and his boss at MS needs to be taken out back for that)

To fix, possibly this:
Disconnect all drives but the C
Get your install media, boot from it, and find the Repair function.
This may fix things.

Ceuper · Jul 2, 2015

USAFRet :

I had tried that earlier and couldn't get the CD to boot properly, so gave up. I just tried again, though, and got it working, and the repair function seemed to do its job. Thank you so much for the suggestion! I can boot normally and everything seems fine now. Definitely an odd feature, I would have preferred to always keep the boot info on the same drive as my system files. Anyway, now just the question of what to do with the dead hard disk. Any idea on good recovery software I could try? I'm not holding out hope, but there are a few things that were on there that I wouldn't mind giving a few shots at trying to recover.

Thanks again.

Also, I'm looking for suggestions on a new GPU here, if anyone has ideas.

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