Crash Then no HD

[sscohen]

OK A strange thing happened.
1st Got a blue screen and memory dump.
Restarted but it went to cd for boot. Went into bios and all 4 HD were there and listed as 1st boot. Still no hardrive. After trying that a few times I went to the Vista disk and saw the hard drives but only 3 were there and my C was not. I thought HD was bad.
I started moving the SATA cables around. Ended up plugging a different cable into c drive and left the other 3 off. Computer booted fine after asking about safe mode. I thought ok it is a bad cable. So I started plugging in the other drives one at a time and all is fine. I then decide to plug the last drive in with the so called bad cable and it shows up ok.
So what does that mean? Any ideas how I should proceed? I already backed up everything just incase.
Thanks,
Steve
Setup
Win Vista 64
Q9550 Quad
ASUS P5Q Pro MB
ASUS HD4850 w/ 1GB
4 500GB Seagate Barracudas
2 DVD burners
750W PS
8GB Corsair Dominator RAM

 

[Wolfshadw]

Sounds very similar to what happened to me just before my WD 500GB drive died on me (almost a year ago). BSOD followed by a system boot error (no boot disk found). Took everything apart. Didn't notice anything out of order, so I replaced everything and it booted fine. Couple of boots later, I had a brick. Could happen today, could happen two years from now. Since you've already backed up, I'd recommend leaving it in until it fails (could have just been a bit of dust, too) and having a replacement ready should you need one.

-Wolf sends

 

[sscohen]

Thanks for the quick reply. So yo think it's the drive and not the cable? Is there anything I can do to prevent it or am I stuck with it.
Thanks,
Steve

 

[Wolfshadw]

Since the cable worked with other drives, I find it unlikely (though possible). There's nothing I know of to prevent a dying drive from eventually pushing up the daisies. The best I found was S.M.A.R.T. Gart (or something like that) for possibly recovering data on the drive, but I think that's a Western Digital program only.

-Wolf sends

 

[nocteratus]

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
Diagnostic program from seagate... it should detect the errors and then you can RMA the drive to seagate with the exact error number for a replacement.

 

[sscohen]

Thanks.
One last question.
I have a spare 500gb drive. Am I able to copy my c drive on to it and switch cables and boot from the copy?
I just want to save having to reinstall everything.
Steve

 

[nocteratus]

you'll need a third party program like ghost or acronis to do an image from the first to the second disk...

 

[sscohen]

A folllow up. I made an image just incase the drive goes bad with Macrium Reflect. All 4 drives are working fine with the same cables. I thought I would switch the cables back the way they were as I had them color coded. After the switch the same problem no HD to boot from. Switched the cables again and everything is OK.

So A bad cable that would only work on some drives (all 4 are identical). A bad sata port on the MB but then why does ot work with a different cable. Or somehow that sata port does not like to be used as the boot drive any more.

Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Steve