Separate the possiblities. Try plugging the drive into another machine as a slave to see if it can be read, and try another drive with the motherboard.
Great idea.
So, a bit more info: When the problem first occurred, it would not boot x 3 (Disk read errors, et. al. above.) BIOS showed the Intel SSD as present, but still getting the error.
Then suddenly I get past the POST screen & windows starts to load.
Only, it ain't WIN 7...
it's WinXP.
Head scratcher - which turns out to be a problem, as it interferes with diagnostics* (Windows shows a successful load, so no good diagnostic on why the SSD failed - also, the XP version doesn't recognize recent changes and is oddly (read: not very) stable - allowing me to do some limited internetting to seek solutions, but its slow and buggy.
Turns out the sys found an old copy of WinXP still resident on an old Maxtor IDE drive I had plugged in as a slave to transfer files, but never removed...
Since I don't have another machine available, ATM, I decided to do the 'next-best-thing' and swap cables around.
Just as I got down to do so, I notice the ONLY drive being recognized is the IDE drive. Neither of my SATA drives (SSD or HDD) are recognized (well, I don't remember if the XP version saw the DVD or Blu-Ray or not).
So I move the SSD from SATA 0 to SATA 1 & shuffle everything else to different (not "0") ports - hit the button and here I am back in Win 7.
Event viewer (WinXP) shows some HAL errors. I'm starting to think it's the MOBO - but not certain.
*
Action Center said:
Windows failed to start because of a problem with the hard disk
Windows could not detect the problem. The boot status indicated that Windows booted successfully.
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