Win 7 Install boot issues

[alkalinetaupehat]

About a month ago I moved over to Windows Seven RTM via my school's MSDNAA program. It has been running just fine, except for this particular boot issue.

When I first installed Seven the BIOS was set to AHCI mode to enable hot-swap SATA, but after a week or two the OS was no longer detected. Switching to IDE mode in the BIOS solved this and I chalked things up to carelessness during the installation.

After another two weeks or so my computer is no longer booting my OS, but can boot the repair and installation disks I keep around. I checked that the boot drive was detected and that I could read/write to it, and have a backup of my data. I have tried clearing the CMOS and switching between AHCI/IDE modes, the OS is using the default drivers, Device Manager had no missing driver notices when I last booted the OS, and I checked that the boot drive was the HDD booted from and that it was first in the boot order (I have another drive for storage in this system).

Is there anything I can do short of reformat and pray to get the install back up? I don't look forward to redoing all the settings I have in Seven, or re-downloading my Steam games...

Thanks as always for your help.

 

[taltamir]

my guess is that you are experiencing random corruption of OS files brought upon by hardware issues. Test your ram for errors, your HDD itself might be having issues, so is the CPU or mobo...
As for fixing the problems... you will need to do a fresh install of windows anyways after you are done fixing the hardware.

 

[Binky]

Have you tried booting from the first drive with the second drive disconnected? You could also try disconnecting the second drive, and using the Win7 DVD to repair the boot files.

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

This was a major oversight on my part, but I failed to mention that I had hooked up another HDD in place of the second drive to check that it would boot and back up some files from it. Once I had swapped a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 (iirc) in place of a 1TB Caviar Black the issues started today.

Now that I have removed the Momentus and put the Caviar back, the system boots and I am left wondering about the underlying issue. I suspect a hardware problem since in the past the BIOS "lost" settings such as which drive to boot from and overclock configurations. I have flashed to the 22** series BIOS for my motherboard and have a copy of every BIOS ROM released, but when I was troubleshooting during the first occurrence I flashed back to the 503 series BIOS. Another bit of info I find interesting is that the Win 7 Repair disk does not detect the OS install when the computer won't boot. I'm going to check if this happens now that the system boots again.

Pointers on troubleshooting which piece of hardware may be at fault would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Billb2]

No, you installed two drives, both havibg boot sectors, and confused Windows as to which to boot from.

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

Today I tried booting with the second hard drive out and it wouldn't boot. AFAIK a second drive used only as storage wouldn't be involved in the boot process, but it seems here that whenever I change the physical HDD configuration the computer ceases to boot.

I did specify in the BIOS to boot from my OS drive, but perhaps there is/was an error which results in the BIOS improperly communicating this to the OS?

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: alkalinetaupehat
This was a major oversight on my part, but I failed to mention that I had hooked up another HDD in place of the second drive to check that it would boot and back up some files from it. Once I had swapped a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 (iirc) in place of a 1TB Caviar Black the issues started today.

Assuming that you do not have an actual hardware problem, which I'm not convinced you don't since you had this problem with AHCI to begin with...

I'd suspect that when you swapped devices you messed up the device boot order in your BIOS. From here, you would definitely experience the kind of problems you are describing.

It's also possible that there is a BIOS problem in which your current boot device is simply moving to a new address after you added the new drive. In essence, the new disk bumped your original disk down a notch.

The easy way to fix this is to correct the boot order in your BIOS to boot the proper disk.

If that doesn't work, you may need to fix the boot config information by doing a repair from your recovery console and try to recover the boot config.

 

[zagood]

1. mbr
2. bad sata cable

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: alkalinetaupehat
I did specify in the BIOS to boot from my OS drive...

Hmmmm.

Do you mean the drive that has windows installed on it (ie. the drive with the Windows folder on it) or the boot drive (ie. the drive with the boot sector on it)?

These can be (and probably are in your setup) two different drives.