My boot drive (SSD) got disconnected, now my BIOS recognizes it but it won’t boot.
Earlier today my computer just stopped working. It turns out the SATA cable connecting my SSD to the motherboard had conked out. I got a replacement, and now it won’t boot. When I go to the BIOS menu, it recognizes it as an option to boot from, but if I choose it, it gives me “no boot drive, please restart or insert boot media into drive”. It also doesn’t show up under “Boot Option Priorities” as an option. It worked fine before the cable broke. What should I do?
My drive is a Sandisk 128GB SSD. I also have a 1TB storage drive and a DVD drive (which the Boot Option Priorities list does recognize). Processor Intel i7 3770k; UEFI Z77 Pro4 P1.20
If you start it with a Linux live disk, to provide a temporary operating system, can you see the drive ? If you can read files, then it may have just lost the operating system status, or some essential file.
Okay, so I set that up on a USB stick… Where would I look for it? Probably under devices (that’s where my other hard drive’s partitions showed up)… It’s not there. Fuck. What does this mean?
…Oh dear. When I select my windows boot drive on the setup utility menu, it gives me Ubuntu. That… probably shouldn’t happen. How should I proceed?
I would guess the Ubuntu menu item will only be there whilst the linux USB is active.
I don’t use Ubuntu, so am not sure how their new Unity environment works, but if the live disk uses the old Gnome environment or is similar, these links may help.
Note, as they say, the SSD drive needs to be mounted as they show how, in a terminal command line box with sudo, and before leaving unmount it ( this due to some old Unix stupidity is spelt umount ).
You can also start a partition manager called GParted from the menu and it will show all drives attached, if there then at least you know it still starts up, but I wouldn’t use any of GParted’s functions to change anything about the drive if unfamiliar with it. Partition managers can format disks and once that happens the information is gone.
Inspecting it with a live disk does no harm, and millions of people have recovered files from dying drives with live disks; if of course the drive is dead then only experts can recover files…
First, I doubt there is anything wrong with the cable.
Second, if your BIOS recognizes the drive and it just won’t boot, try repairing the drive with the Windows install disk. If you’re like most people you don’t have a recovery setup and will just need to repair the system.
FWIW, you can get a message like that (“please insert media”) if the SATA port isn’t fully and properly connected – in fact that happened to me recently on an external notebook drive that I had dropped, but fortunately the impact had just loosened the disk from its SATA connection, when I pushed it back in it worked fine. Before giving up on the disk, you should double-check the cable and connection at both ends, possibly try another cable, and if you have access to a computer, try another internal or eSATA connection with a different cable. Or if you have or can borrow an external USB enclosure for a notebook size drive, try putting the disk in that and connecting via USB as a test. It just seems unlikely that an SSD would have suddenly fried itself, and if you had problems with the cable or connectors before that makes that possibility rather suspect.
I tried both 32-bit and 64-bit and both times it gave me “not compatible with windows version”. It’s the same install disk I used to install the system in the first place.
The boot order could be UEFI, this prevents Win7 sometimes to install on SSD’s – change the boot order to IDE or from the CD. Or make sure UEFI is not enabled (Win7 does not need it).
You may have some Bios setting preventing you from using the SSD as a boot drive, see within the Bios, if this drive is set to “not a Boot drive”
I would recommend to disconnect the standard HDD, when install the OS on the SSD.
What is the model of your mainboard?
After the install of the OS, you can change it the “Boot Option Priorities” to something like this:
Boot option #1 AHCI: SSD (not your 1TB HDD)
Boot option #2 SATA: DVD drive or Disable
Boot option #3 Disable
Boot option #4 Disable
Make sure, that UEFI is disabled.
Also make sure, that you disconnect the cables from the other SATA hard drive.
If the windows setup detects the drive, it should work. If it’s still not compatible download and burn the Linux Live CD.
You can download a Linux Live CD here - Select HDD - Data Recovery - PhotoRec
Here you can see if your HDD is there, backup some files or delete all Partions with the Partition Editor.
Btw, there are something like 16 different versions of that Z77 mainboard from ASRock
Ah… Reinstall the OS. Okay, I haven’t tried that yet. I’ll give that a shot.
I don’t know how to do that.
Okay, so it gave me the option “update” and the option “user-defined install” (translating from german here, so this might not be exact). When I chose “update” it told me to turn off the PC, take out the install disk, and then start windows normally. Tried that, didn’t work, so now I’m at user-defined install. I’m at the screen “where do you want to install windows”, and the drive does show up. WIth the name “Nicht zugewiesener speicherplatz auf Datenträger 0” (basically “free space on drive 0”). And a warning: “windows cannot be installed on this drive”. When I click on show details, I get “Windows cannot be installed on the drive. The hardware of this computer may not support starting this drive. Make sure that the controller in the BIOS menu is active.” Not sure how to do that either. I’ve already ordered a new SSD… Now it’s just a question of “can what’s on this one be salvaged”.
Go into the BIOS by pressing “F2” or “Del” (on a German Keyboard that’s “Entf”) when you see the ASRock logo on-screen.
Within the Bios, look for this screen
Make sure SATA Mode is AHCI
Then go to the “Boot” section, it should look something like this
There select as follow:
Boot option #1 SATA: DVD drive
Boot option #2 AHCI: SSD (or SATA depending on Bios)
Boot option #3 Disable
Boot option #4 Disable (you may have more boot options - all you need enabled are the first two)
Then exit the bios and try to boot up as usual.
If your boot fails, then most likely you need to reinstall Windows. For this you might need to erase all the partitions on your SSD.
You can do this via “Drive options (advanced)” - delete and confirm for all partitions available. After that you should be able to select the drive and install Windows on it.
Just be aware, that this will ERASE / DELETE all the files you have on that SSD.
If you require any files from that drive, you can use the Linux Ultimate Boot CD - Select HDD - Data Recovery - PhotoRec
Here you can see if your HDD backup your files via the File tool to an external USB drive.
How long had you been using this OS and drive prior to the problem?
Reinstalling the OS is failure. Can you post pictures of your connections between mainboard and drives, as well as some screenshots (from an external camera of course)?
I think this one point renders all the other advice rather moot. Sounds like your initial assessment that the SSD is fried is probably correct. My main contribution here was to suggest that the error you were seeing can indeed be caused by a bad SATA connection, but sounds like in this instance it really is the disk itself.
You might take a look at the gold contacts on the Sandisk SSD and maybe clean them off with an alcohol swab. Also check the power connections – some disks get their power from a set of pins to the left of the SATA port, others from a set of contacts within the SATA assembly. Most SSDs don’t even have the pins, but just make sure the Sandisk is connected as it was originally. If you have another computer, you might try downloading the Sandisk toolkit or following their troubleshooting chart but I’m afraid at this point it looks like you’re running out of options.
Thanks for the advice guys, but the new drive should show up tomorrow and it does seem like this one is fried. I’m just gonna install the new one and hope that I installed some backup-making program and forgot about it.
New one showed up today, plugged it in with exactly the same configuration as the other one, installed windows… Yeah, the problem was the drive was dead. That’s a damn shame. Fuck, I hope I didn’t lose my D&D Campaign.
Ooookay, you guys are good at this. Turns out I was smart at some point in my life and started making full system backups (“Systemabbild”, I really wish I could get my stupid computer to speak english in these menus). Yay me! However, I followed the instructions to restore it, and got this error:
“Firmware incorrect. The image was created on a computer with BIOS firmware, this computer is using EFI”
…Assuming that the contents of my boot drive are, until I can actually get that restore, completely moot (the backups are on a storage drive with no OS), and I could easily reinstall windows or reformat the new drive, what do I have to do to fix this?
I’m a little confused about why the firmware incompatibility message is coming up. Is this backup from some other computer? Did you change the BIOS/UEFI settings between the time you made the backup and now? Why would get that message trying to restore your own original system image back to the same computer? I’m completely unclear on how you’re trying to restore this backup and where it came from.
That aside, I just wanted to throw in another thought about the old disk. If you’ve decided that it’s fried and not salvageable, it just might be worth taking a long shot to see if you can reflash the firmware. It probably won’t work, but there’s a small chance that it’s the firmware that confused itself and not the drive storage itself, and if you’re bored it’s at least worth a shot. Just be really careful that you don’t accidentally flash the new drive by accident. The F/W flash is done with a bootable CD or USB stick created with the Sandisk toolkit (I posted a link upthread). Once that is created, I would completely unplug the new drive to make sure it’s safe, connect the old one, and give it a try, boot the flash CD or USB and give it a shot. Should only take a few minutes.
