Hard drive not booting

Rknight718

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Jun 14, 2015
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I've looked at a few topics on this already and I think I know the answer but I'd like to know more.

I have a Windows 7 desktop PC, ASUS motherboard with UEFI, have had it for maybe 3 years now. Yesterday evening I went to boot it up and I get something to the effect of:

Realtek PCIe Family Controller etc...
Media Test Failure, Check Cable
Exiting PXE ROM

From what I've looked up I think my HDD is borked. It's a WD Blue 1TB SATA 64MB Cache WD10EZEX and it's as old as the PC as I got it at the same time as the rest of the PC parts (first real build) My ASUS BIOS can see the drive.

I hooked it up to another PC at work. The BIOS sees it there too. I used Disk Management to see if I could view any files on it for salvaging and it shows 931 GB capacity and 931 GB free. It's also marked as primary partition along with the main C: drive of the work PC.

There wasn't anything on the drive that isn't recoverable (Mainly used for gaming on Steam so it just means hours/days of downloading) but is the whole drive dead? If it thinks it's empty could I attempt to reformat it and reinstall Win 7 on it again or would it be easier/safer to get a new one?

Basically is it possible there's something left on the drive worth saving or is the whole drive worth saving for storage purposes? Any answers are appreciated and I apologize for slow responses. With my PC down I'm limited to work PCs and iPad usage.
 
Solution
"Realtek PCIe Family Controller etc...
Media Test Failure, Check Cable
Exiting PXE ROM
"

That's a typical sign of the PC attempting to boot off the network because it cannot find bootable media anywhere else. Either the drive has failed or it was improperly connected, or faulty cables.

If you can rule out the last two, then the drive needs replacing, no sense in trying to revive it.
If you want confirmation of drive failure, test it with WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostic for Windows while it's connected as a second drive on another PC: http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
"Realtek PCIe Family Controller etc...
Media Test Failure, Check Cable
Exiting PXE ROM
"

That's a typical sign of the PC attempting to boot off the network because it cannot find bootable media anywhere else. Either the drive has failed or it was improperly connected, or faulty cables.

If you can rule out the last two, then the drive needs replacing, no sense in trying to revive it.
If you want confirmation of drive failure, test it with WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostic for Windows while it's connected as a second drive on another PC: http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
 
Solution