- Aug 18, 2007
- 25
- 0
- 18,530
Hey folks,
I went away for a weekend recently and upon returning my system wouldn't boot past the windows 8 loading screen which would spin infinitely or alternatively would show "Preparing automatic repair" then immediately lead to a black screen.
I presumed at first that this was an issue with my SSD on which windows was actually installed and so ran through the processes of checking/reparing the MBR. Nothing seemed to work so I picked up a new Samsung 850 Pro 512gb and reinstalled Windows 8.1 from scratch. The problem still persisted so I disconnected the previous two drives and found that everything then works ok. I've now worked out that it is the HDD, a Seagate Barracuda 3TB which prevents the startup process and that I can still boot onto my new windows installation with the new SSD and my old SSD plugged in (I can't boot the old windows install on my old SSD though, maybe due to some files being located on the HDD?).
I've created a rescue USB with testdisk etc on it with which I can boot and see the HDD, searching for partitions shows two partitions with exactly the same start and very similar end points as well as a small partition containing system volume information which overlaps them. Both the similar partitions show my files within them but writing either structure doesn't appear to fix the problem, the MBR under advanced options appears ok as well.
I've also checked for simpler issues like cable problems but they appear to be fine. As such I'm running out of ideas, the drive contains a lot of data, some of which is important so ideally I'd like to fix it but otherwise I'll need to transfer specific parts off somehow.
I went away for a weekend recently and upon returning my system wouldn't boot past the windows 8 loading screen which would spin infinitely or alternatively would show "Preparing automatic repair" then immediately lead to a black screen.
I presumed at first that this was an issue with my SSD on which windows was actually installed and so ran through the processes of checking/reparing the MBR. Nothing seemed to work so I picked up a new Samsung 850 Pro 512gb and reinstalled Windows 8.1 from scratch. The problem still persisted so I disconnected the previous two drives and found that everything then works ok. I've now worked out that it is the HDD, a Seagate Barracuda 3TB which prevents the startup process and that I can still boot onto my new windows installation with the new SSD and my old SSD plugged in (I can't boot the old windows install on my old SSD though, maybe due to some files being located on the HDD?).
I've created a rescue USB with testdisk etc on it with which I can boot and see the HDD, searching for partitions shows two partitions with exactly the same start and very similar end points as well as a small partition containing system volume information which overlaps them. Both the similar partitions show my files within them but writing either structure doesn't appear to fix the problem, the MBR under advanced options appears ok as well.
I've also checked for simpler issues like cable problems but they appear to be fine. As such I'm running out of ideas, the drive contains a lot of data, some of which is important so ideally I'd like to fix it but otherwise I'll need to transfer specific parts off somehow.
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