"Scanning Drives" screen won't go away ..no boot

[angry hampster]

THis morning my computer started showing this behavior. After the BIOS option logo/screen, the computer just says "Scanning drives......" and will sit on that screen indefinitely. Have had no problems until today.

Setup:
- Gigabyte 785G USB3 motherboard
- Phenom II 555 @ 3.5GHz
- 4GB G.Skill DDR3
- HIS 4870

- OS drive is a WD 320GB caviar blue running Win7 Ultimate x64. I've tried getting into the BIOS to check boot order, but I can't actually get there because of the "scanning drives" screen. Any suggestions?

 

[Matt1970]

Unplug your secondary drive then CD Rom till it gets past that screen. It's hosed up trying to identify one of the drives.

 

[angry hampster]

Would this just be due to the BIOS getting confused? I'm at work now and didn't even think of trying to clear the CMOS to circumvent the problem. What do you think would cause this out of the blue?

 

[THRiLL KiLL]

pretty much its stating that it cant find your hard drive, thus windows isnt booting.

The issue can be a bad drive \ bad cable \ bad sata port.

my home theater has a flaky motherboard, in most cases i just power it off and turn it back on, and it finds the hard drive.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Doesnt mean that its the hard drive per se, but one of your devices is causing it to hang on boot, reseat the cables and then if that doesnt work, remove them one at a time until it boots. Clearing the cmos wouldnt hurt either.

 

[angry hampster]

Tried removing/reseating cables one at a time. Didn't help anything. Clearing CMOS seems to have fixed it at least for the boot drive. Haven't plugged the media drives in yet.

 

[angry hampster]

Problem came back today. This time I simply unplugged the SATA cords from my 2 data drives, and it booted fine afterward.

Everything in the BIOS is at default.

?????

 

[skipsneeky2]

Swap sata cables and replace them maybe dust in the connections

 

[THRiLL KiLL]

Problem came back today. This time I simply unplugged the SATA cords from my 2 data drives, and it booted fine afterward.

Everything in the BIOS is at default.

?????

i wonder if your sata controller is about to go belly-up