No booting into windows

[bobbe23]

Hi guys and girls (I know you are out there) of toms.

Let me get straight to the point. My gf was playing medal of honor on my pc yesterday. When I took her home I removed my harddrive and put it in a external bay for her to copy stuff.

She copies what she needs, I go home and slip in the harddrive and i'm staring at a blinking underscore. I tested ram, cpu, powersupply, gpu, sata cables, sata ports, bios boot settings and occasionally kicking the pc!

It shows the boot screen and immediately goes to the blinking underscore. In the bios it picks up the harddrive but since I do not have a secondary pc I can not check if it works being used as an external.

The specs are as follows:

windows 7 64-bit
c2d e6750 (stock)
intel dg33bu mobo (i know)
2x 2gb corsair ddr800 modules
ati 4850 512mb
550watt psu
1.5tb seagate 7200rpm hdd (bought last week)

any indication to what component is the cause of my hair loss would be greatly appreciated!

 

[bobbe23]

lolz. I screwed in all the screws in the bay to make sure the hdd is secure. It is unfortunately my primary hdd. I am unable to re-install due to the pc being idly stuck at the blinking underscore screen and not giving the option to "press any button to...".

I swapped sata cables and plugged it into all the sata pors. nada.

 

[jj463rd]

Yeah like dipankar2007ind said try to enter BIOS and see if you can correct the fault there.BTW why didn't you use a Flash Drive (They are cheap) to transfer files instead or a couple of blank DVD's.

 

[bobbe23]

hey jj, tried every single boot change in the bios. First thing I did was reset the CMOS and no change. I do not want to take the hdd back because I will only get a new one in the new year (companies closing for the festive season).

I am trying to deny the fact that it could be the hdd since I will be without a working pc for 3 weeks :-(

 

[bobbe23]

@jj, flashdrives too tiny (a decent sized one too expensive in the wonderful republic of south-africa) and I used blank dvd's so long ago that I am under the impression that the only place you can find them is in museums. lol ;-)

 

[MultiPress]

Are you able to boot from any kind of disk,like a live boot-cd and able to access the HDD ?
My guess is that your HDD is no longer recognized as the primary(boot) disk

 

[bobbe23]

@multipress, I don't have any linux distros to check that.

@dipankar, yes I can access the bios. After the fullscreen intel screen I get the blinking underscore screen.

 

[bobbe23]

Fetched my dads laptop from his work. Working perfectly as an external I have one question now. My harddrive is working so it should be a BIOS mess-up. Should'nt a clear Cmos fix the issue? I am currently scanning for virusses now.

 

[bobbe23]

I've got a intel dg33bu mobo and she has an msi k8 nforce 4 board me thinks. I plugged in my hdd via an external bay and not via sata cables.

So it is weird for me that the chipset driver coulf be corrupted unless my gf has I virus which I doubt since she has AVG 2011 which is updated on a daily basis.

I cannot enter safe mode unfortunately and I get no error messages and SMART is enabled.

 

[bobbe23]

Thanks, both our windows is genuine. She copied from my harddrive on several occassions and this did not happen before, i'll try to re-install and report back.

 

[bobbe23]

Thanks for the replies guys. Fixed the issue. The reason why only the hdd or the dvd writer worked was because of a busted sata cable of the writer. Never tested the cable of the writer 'coz I was under the impression the fault is lying with the hdd.

Got the writer and hdd to work and rebuilt the bcd and boot sector with my windows disc.

Booted into windows and no problems ever since. I took the drive to the gf again and when I put it back into my system it booted fine.

Ghost in the machine I guess

 

[jj463rd]

Happy to hear of your success.Yeah cables often can be a problem and it's always good to have some spares lying around.