I was wondering whether any of you would be able to help me troubleshoot a problem I’m having with my desktop, because I’ve run through all the things I can think of.
I powered up my desktop today, and it would not boot Windows. I went into the BIOS and ascertained that the motherboard was not talking to the SSD that Windows was installed on. It could talk to my other HD, as well as the DVD drive. So, I did the obvious thing and disconnected/reconnected the SATA power and data cables.
I powered on the desktop again. It did not boot Windows. I checked the BIOS and the motherboard could talk to the SSD now, so I checked the boot order and made sure that it would try to boot from the SSD first.
I restarted the computer. It did not boot Windows. I switched the boot drive to the DVD drive and stuck the Windows install DVD in it. It could read that, so I used the utilities it had for repairing the boot whatever.
The computer restarted, and it did not boot Windows from the SSD. I went into the BIOS to make it boot from the SSD first, restarted, and it did not boot Windows.
I booted off of the Windows install disk and checked and apparently I don’t have any earlier system images or recovery points or whatever they’re called to restore from.
I considered plugging my SSD into another desktop to see if it would boot Windows there, but I don’t have access to any other desktops that I can open up.
So. What next? Also, I don’t know if this is relevant, but it took for ever every time I tried to get into the BIOS-- something like 2-5 minutes between the time I’d hit F2 and the time when the BIOS would pop up.
Some motherboards support choosing the boot device at boot time, usually by hitting F8, F12 or something similar. If you have that feature, try that to manually choose the boot device.
You can also try to plug your SSD into another port on the motherboard to isolate the port on the controller as the problem.
If your DVD is SATA as well, swap the data cable (power seems good as the drive spins up and you can see it) to isolate the data cable as the problem.
If it is being seen by the BIOS and seen by the Windows Recovery CD then odds are for some reason your partition table doesn’t have Windows marked as active. You can confirm this by using something like gParted which you can download from another computer and install on a USB Key or make ISO into a CD-ROM.
You will need another computer, I’m afraid, that can make CD-ROM’s or a USB Key handy you can re-format for gParted.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I’ve followed up on a lot of them below, but I think the bottom line at this point is that I’m 95% certain there’s some mechanical problem with the drive.
Tried that; didn’t boot Windows.
I switched out the SATA data and power cables between the SSD and the working hard drive, and that didn’t help. The SATA data and power cables can hook up to multiple hard drives, and since the working hard drive works, I don’t think it’s the connection between the motherboard and the data cable, and the power cable and the power supply, that’s the problem.
So now here’s a weird thing. I can use a command prompt through the Windows install CD, and even though the motherboard can see the SSD in the BIOS, MS-DOS prompt can’t. The command prompt could see the working hard drive, the DVD drive, as well as two thumb drives, so this seems to be a problem that’s specific to the SSD.
I put gParted onto a thumb drive but couldn’t run it out of command prompt, so that’ll take a bit more work.
I’m also working on getting a copy of Ubuntu that I can run off a thumb drive, and once I have that working, hopefully I can have more tools to poke around and see what’s going on.
But at this point, I think most signs point towards the drive being dead. That would be a pain, but pretty much only the OS and a bunch of programs are on the SSD, so I didn’t lose any real data. Worst case I get a new hard drive and spend an afternoon re-installing stuff.