- Sep 30, 2007
- 13
- 0
- 18,510
A background of the various things that have been happening.
Most of my components date back about 10 years, but they were top of the line when I built it so I can still play the games I want to on it without trouble.
Vista 32
ASUS P5ND
Geforce GTX2560
Soundblaster X-FI Fatal1ty
New HD: Western Digital Blue 1TB, 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Intel Core 2 Duo (don't remember model number or speed)
Four sticks of RAM, I forget the exact specifications and model. I think it's 4GB.
1. My HD dies last year, clicking noise. I wait a long time to buy a replacement.
2. I buy a "new" hitachi HD off a third party vendor on newegg, but it fails with a clicking noise the day after I install it. I believe it was not really a new HD because there seem to be a lot of third party sellers with tons of 1 star reviews about how they are scamming people by selling used drives as new.
3. I buy a genuinely new HD direct from newegg themselves, western digitial blue.
4. I throw out the old hard drive SATA cable and open up a new one out of the plastic package (although the cord itself is about 8-10 years old, it has just sat in a box all that time unused).
5. I try to install windows 10. The disc iso I burned on another computer doesn't work. So I go back to install vista 32 for now.
6. I run into the same problems with this new HD as I did with the old while trying to install windows.
a) Sometimes the windows software on the CD takes forever to load, extremely excessive amounts of time to where I wonder if it's frozen, whereas other times I might restart the computer and it loads quickly.
b) Windows installation doesn't recognize that I have a HD installed at first so I can't install windows, but bios does recognize it as installed. After restarting the windows software does recognize it and I install windows. I partitioned the drive in half and install to the primary one.
7. The very next day, upon turning on the computer again, I get another boot disk failure. But the HD is still recognized as installed in bios. And there's no clicking noises.
8. Now bios takes extremely long to even boot. It seems like it takes 15-20 minutes just to get past the bios boot up screen. And if I hit delete to enter setup, it seems to spend just as long saying "entering setup..." before I finally get to the setup screen.
9. The windows software on the installation disc takes even longer. Like I have to come back in 30 minutes before it finishes even starting up.
10. I changed the boot order for the HD to be first. No help.
11. I am now currently trying to do a repair of system using the vista 32 installation disc. It took what seemed like an hour before I could get from boot up to where it is not "searching for problems" with my startup.
12. After completing the startup repair, it says the root cause is that a hard disk could not be found. Even though I had checked before doing this that bios showed the HD installed.
13. I restart, verify in bios the HD is still there. It is.
14. I restart to see if the vista installation will recognize my HD as being there. After what seems like 30 minutes of loading, it doesn't. Because it doesn't recognize a HD as being there I can't perform any startup repairs or system restores.
Possibilities of what could be wrong:
-This doesn't make any sense that this would be a faulty hard drive unless I had some kind of bios virus that caused my original HD to die in the first place.
It couldn't be a boot sector HD virus because it's a new HD.
I don't know where else a virus could hide unless there's some kind of boot sector that can be written into on my xfinity router.
-I do know I have a DVD/CD RW drive that is in a questionable state. For a long time it has had trouble opening properly. But for all I know it's merely a mechnical problem with the door and not a sign of a failing drive. I don't know if there could be an issue with taking a long time to read or corrupted installs. Either way, I have a new DVD drive on the way in a matter of days.
-The only other possibility I can think of is that I'm having some kind of partial motherboard failure that is just causing all these problems with bios and the SATA interface. Presuming that just it's sheer age has caused it to break down in some way that doesn't result in complete failure. I don't know how I'd verify if that was the case. I can't afford to basically build a new computer by buying a new motherboard and all the new components I'd need to go with it.
-I don't suspect the SATA wire would be at fault here. That wouldn't explain my extremely long bios boot times.
What could be the real issue here, and how do I correct it?
Most of my components date back about 10 years, but they were top of the line when I built it so I can still play the games I want to on it without trouble.
Vista 32
ASUS P5ND
Geforce GTX2560
Soundblaster X-FI Fatal1ty
New HD: Western Digital Blue 1TB, 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Intel Core 2 Duo (don't remember model number or speed)
Four sticks of RAM, I forget the exact specifications and model. I think it's 4GB.
1. My HD dies last year, clicking noise. I wait a long time to buy a replacement.
2. I buy a "new" hitachi HD off a third party vendor on newegg, but it fails with a clicking noise the day after I install it. I believe it was not really a new HD because there seem to be a lot of third party sellers with tons of 1 star reviews about how they are scamming people by selling used drives as new.
3. I buy a genuinely new HD direct from newegg themselves, western digitial blue.
4. I throw out the old hard drive SATA cable and open up a new one out of the plastic package (although the cord itself is about 8-10 years old, it has just sat in a box all that time unused).
5. I try to install windows 10. The disc iso I burned on another computer doesn't work. So I go back to install vista 32 for now.
6. I run into the same problems with this new HD as I did with the old while trying to install windows.
a) Sometimes the windows software on the CD takes forever to load, extremely excessive amounts of time to where I wonder if it's frozen, whereas other times I might restart the computer and it loads quickly.
b) Windows installation doesn't recognize that I have a HD installed at first so I can't install windows, but bios does recognize it as installed. After restarting the windows software does recognize it and I install windows. I partitioned the drive in half and install to the primary one.
7. The very next day, upon turning on the computer again, I get another boot disk failure. But the HD is still recognized as installed in bios. And there's no clicking noises.
8. Now bios takes extremely long to even boot. It seems like it takes 15-20 minutes just to get past the bios boot up screen. And if I hit delete to enter setup, it seems to spend just as long saying "entering setup..." before I finally get to the setup screen.
9. The windows software on the installation disc takes even longer. Like I have to come back in 30 minutes before it finishes even starting up.
10. I changed the boot order for the HD to be first. No help.
11. I am now currently trying to do a repair of system using the vista 32 installation disc. It took what seemed like an hour before I could get from boot up to where it is not "searching for problems" with my startup.
12. After completing the startup repair, it says the root cause is that a hard disk could not be found. Even though I had checked before doing this that bios showed the HD installed.
13. I restart, verify in bios the HD is still there. It is.
14. I restart to see if the vista installation will recognize my HD as being there. After what seems like 30 minutes of loading, it doesn't. Because it doesn't recognize a HD as being there I can't perform any startup repairs or system restores.
Possibilities of what could be wrong:
-This doesn't make any sense that this would be a faulty hard drive unless I had some kind of bios virus that caused my original HD to die in the first place.
It couldn't be a boot sector HD virus because it's a new HD.
I don't know where else a virus could hide unless there's some kind of boot sector that can be written into on my xfinity router.
-I do know I have a DVD/CD RW drive that is in a questionable state. For a long time it has had trouble opening properly. But for all I know it's merely a mechnical problem with the door and not a sign of a failing drive. I don't know if there could be an issue with taking a long time to read or corrupted installs. Either way, I have a new DVD drive on the way in a matter of days.
-The only other possibility I can think of is that I'm having some kind of partial motherboard failure that is just causing all these problems with bios and the SATA interface. Presuming that just it's sheer age has caused it to break down in some way that doesn't result in complete failure. I don't know how I'd verify if that was the case. I can't afford to basically build a new computer by buying a new motherboard and all the new components I'd need to go with it.
-I don't suspect the SATA wire would be at fault here. That wouldn't explain my extremely long bios boot times.
What could be the real issue here, and how do I correct it?
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