Can an SSD kill a motherboard?

[freedom90]

I bought a Crucial M500 120GB SSD and installed it, cloned my main drive onto it then booted up.
It was quite slow (for an SSD) and pretty much the same speed as the HDD, which led me to think that it was still booting from the HDD even when I selected the SSD in the boot menu.

I checked in disk manager and it showed that the SSD was the boot drive when I selected it and the HDD was the boot drive when I select that.

I disconnected the HDD and booted up with only the SSD attached - so there would definitely be no possibility that it was booting from the HDD.
All I got was a grey screen where I should be seeing the Windows load screen.

I powered off by holding the power button then tried to switch it back on and it didn't.
Eventually I diagnosed that the motherboard is the problem and won't turn on with a different PSU, but the SSD still works from a SATA to USB converter and the data is intact.

So what I would like to know is: is it the motherboards problem or the SSD?
I've added and removed HDDs and other components to the mobo before so I thought it was rock solid. The model is Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

 

[spooky2th]

Try resetting the BIOS.

 

[freedom90]

Cleared it by taking out the battery and putting it back in, but didn't fix it.
I can't tell if it has a power LED or not though it most likely does, but it's not on.

 

[spooky2th]

Did you install the SSD into the same port that the original boot HDD was in?

Also, did you turn the PSU off and unplug it then pull the MB battery out for 10 to 15 mins?

If still no boot, your MB probably died.

Make sure the 24 pin power plug and the CPU power plug are both installed good and tight.

 

[freedom90]

I had it unplugged for long periods of time and kept trying over these 2 days. After RMA'ing it I thought I'd give it one more go and it powered on, with nothing showing on screen and it kept rebooting.
I removed my graphics card and used the onboard and it showed some kind of BIOS recovery screen that disappeared before I got a long look at it, I probably only had a few seconds to choose before it auto selected the first choice option. (Pretty sure I saw words along the line of: error, corrupt and repair)

Put everything back together and it seems to be working, good point about plugging the SSD into the original HDD port I never thought to try that but I've had other issues with the clone and read up on it and it seems it's always recommended to reinstall it so I'm not going to persevere.

I'm still baffled as to why it stopped working for about 2 days but glad it's working now.

 

[spooky2th]

Glad to hear it is working! If you have not already done so, you need to set up the BIOS now starting with optimized defaults. If the BIOS is not set to AHCI mode to get faster read/writes from you SSD, let me know. There is a simple solution. Just going into BIOS and setting it to AHCI mode will cause major problems and you might not be able to boot at all again.

You should be able to install the HDD into another sata port but I would make sure that the comp is set up like you want and running OK.

 

[tcb1005]

As for your speed problem, does your motherboard happen to be SATA II?

 

[freedom90]

My motherboard has SATA III ports which I believe are the blue ones with the blue cables attached - which I assume are SATA III cables.

I think the speed is OK, but I keep getting BSODs now, it is on the latest firmware, TRIM is on but I can't seem to install 2 Intel drivers - one is AHCI/RAID driver and the other is Intel Rapid Storage Technology.
It says platform is unsupported even though I'm using 64 bit Windows and tried installing the 64 bit version.

Device Manager doesn't show any new devices that haven't been installed as well.
I didn't know there would be so much work to install an SSD properly! I haven't even done some of the other things like disabling the page file etc.

 

[spooky2th]

You do not need to install those drivers. You need two drives of the same model and size to set up a RAID configuration.

Did you go into BIOS and set it up? That is needed especially after resetting the BIOS.