Bad drive, motherboard or ???????

[JPS35]

I am looking for assistance to see what might be going on. I have an evga 680i motherboard and recently installed a new Samsung 1TB hard drive to be used as my main drive. Within a few weeks of installing it, it is having trouble booting into Windows 7 x64. It will either get hung up as it begins to post or search for drives, or it will post that the MBR is missing. I have tried rebuilding the MBR, scanning the drive for problems, updating BIOS, latest drivers, reinstalling windows, unplugging the drive, and a few other things will little success. Would this indicate that I received a bad drive or perhaps that the drive and motherboard are not working well together? Thanks for the help and suggestions.

UPDATE 5/2/13

Both primary (1TB) and backup (250MB) have Windows 7 installed. I can now boot from the Primary with no problems. However, I noticed that when I selected to boot from the backup drive (no programs or additional drivers were installed beyond what was installed with Windows 7) that it now has several of the programs and drivers that I installed only on the Primary drive.. It seems that the Primary and Backup are "sharing programs, drives, information, etc.", but I do not have them set up in any kind of RAID format. This is what happened last time as well, and when I reformatted the backup drive to wipe it, the Primary drive started to have problems again.

Thoughts?

 

[Berryracer]

your system files are messed up. either format or use the Windows DVD to try to repaid the boot records (although that has never worked for me) so I prefer to format

good luck

 

[JPS35]

I have done a fresh formatted install 3-4 times and after about 4-10 days, it repeats the problem.

 

[bryanl]

A SATA cable not plugged in all the way can do that.


Run the diagnostic from hddscan.com to test for any subtle errors ignored by most tests, but don't get upset when it reports problems that aren't really problems.

 

[Cerb]

Does the board have the latest firmware? Your symptoms are not atypical. Setting SATA mode to IDE/PATA/emulation may help, too, but reduce performance a bit.

You can browse to you specific model from here (I'm not sure if NF63 and NF68 take different images):
http://www.evga.com/support/download/default.aspx

"evga 680i sata" -- there's not even a need to include words like bug, or problem, to get the links.

But, in particular, this one sums it right up:
http://www.overclock.net/t/141785/evga-680i-sata-bios-fix

Sadly, some people never got it quite working right :\.

 

[Ketchup]

Sounds like a bad cable or controller that doesn't like your hard drive. Does your board have more than one SATA controller?

 

[JPS35]

Well, I formatted my 250 backup drive and installed windows 7 on that one. I again unplugged the 1TB drive and cable, checked them over again, and made sure to plug it all back in again. I then reformatted it, installed Windows again, and made it the current and default OS. Now that I have Windows on both drives, I have to make sure to choose the one on the 1TB drive as it boots up. So far so good. Does having the second OS on the backup drive affect the primary one?

 

[JPS35]

Updated 5/2/13

 

[Ketchup]

However, I noticed that when I selected to boot from the backup drive (no programs or additional drivers were installed beyond what was installed with Windows 7) that it now has several of the programs and drivers that I installed only on the Primary drive.. It seems that the Primary and Backup are "sharing programs, drives, information, etc.", but I do not have them set up in any kind of RAID format. This is what happened last time as well, and when I reformatted the backup drive to wipe it, the Primary drive started to have problems again.

Several programs or all? When you install these programs, are you sure the programs and being installed on the current C:?

If you put just a regular file on the current C:, does it show up on the other drive?

 

[JPS35]

It has shared some (my user folder, Nvidia Graphics Driver, Spybot, a downloaded screensaver, and a few others), but some have not been shared (firefox, as an example).

 

[Ketchup]

That is odd. Assuming these are not "forgotten installs" I don't see how this is possible without some type of RAID array set up. And at that point, it would grab everything. Weird.

 

[Cerb]

Did it go like this:
1. Old broken install now on secondary HDD.
2. New install onto other HDD, with the same user name?

If so, make a new user. Windows acts like it's on drugs, when you have an old install and new install with the same user name, in a workgroup, sometimes. It will often seem to merge the user folders (IE, the old user folder contents will appear in the new drive, and vise versa for new programs only on the new drive). I've seen it 3 or 4 times, now. I have no idea what causes it, or why it doesn't happen, sometimes, either.

 

[JPS35]

Sort of, but the old broken install was on the 1TB main drive. So I reinstalled on the 250 backup (after formatting it), and then formatted and reinstalled on the 1TB drive. BUt, yes, I did use the same user name for both installs. Is there a way to change the user on the backup 250 drive? Given that both are set as Administrator, can I create another user on the 250 and then delete the Administrator on that drive?

 

[Cerb]

In Windows, that's a good question, TBH. Due to odd special behavior of user directories, I tend to solve these types of problems by using Linux, if it either acts weird like that, or denies me the access I want .

 

[JPS35]

Agreed; it is unknown how doing something like this could affect it and thus, the drive I am trying to save.