Hard Drive/Booting Issue (Please Help)

[SkyKast]

Hey all, I'm not sure that this is even a very complex issue I just wanted to see if anyone has a quick solution that I am unaware of. I tried googling but the search terms I need to use are way too vague. My system specs in my profile are up to date so you can check that if needed for troubleshooting.

So here is what happened in order:

I have 3 HDDs. One SSD for OS/programs: LOCAL DISK C, one HDD for storage where all my document libraries are mapped to saving instead of the C drive: STORAGE D, and a third HDD that I use to manually back up to and use for storing backup images and large items I don't need backed up: BACKUP DRIVE E. They are connected to SATA 1, 2, 3 respectively.

With this setup my computer was working perfectly fine. My 5400rpm storage drive however has over 30K hours on it and I wanted to upgrade to a new 7200. I was planning on doing this by cloning my current STORAGE D drive onto this new drive. I thought it would be faster via SATA rather than my SATA/USB adapter but had no more accessible SATA plugs so I unplugged my DVD drive (which was plugged into SATA 5) and used that port and used the SATA power adapter I usually use with the USB adapter for power. I am regretting that now because it seems to have messed things up.

Once I booted with the new drive plugged in it got to the login screen fine, opened Macrium Reflect to clone the drive and then before I could start the clone, BSOD. I tried restarting again and it BSOD during windows boot sequence. Then I unplugged it, and plugged back in the DVD drive, and tried booting it a few times but it would either get to the login screen or just crash fairly quickly (BSOD).

I went into windows repair on the next boot and noticed that the LOCAL DISK is now drive letter F instead of C. I then checked BIOS to make sure the boot order was still how it was supposed to be and it is. To verify the drive letter change, I opened up the case and hooked each drive to my laptop with the USB adapter and found that indeed the LOCAL DISK was now F and also found that both my STORAGE drive and my BACKUP DRIVE were BOTH drive letter E.

So, C changed to F, D changed to E, and E stayed E

I'm assuming that E wasn't changed because it's basically an auxiliary drive that has nothing mapped to it but I don't know. I know I can hook the drives to my laptop and change the drive letters back to what they are supposed to be but I wanted to ask the experts here before making any more moves that would potentially make things worse.

Unfortunately I have no up to date images of my HDDs which I'm slapping myself for right now, but my files are backed up on my external at least. Would love to get away without a clean install, hours and hours of reinstalling software would have to take place to get back to where I am.

Sorry this is so long but I figured the more info the better for troubleshooting. Thanks in advance for any assistance!!!

 

[kn00tcn]

you should remove every ) that comes after a :, it's turned into a smiley face

i'm not sure why data needed cloning, just copy all files

why would you assume usb3 would be slow? i use usb3-sata all the time, it's plenty to go past 100MB/s

this would be easier to read if you made a simple point form chart of before & after letters & their names instead of buried in sentences

plugging in a new drive results in the next available letter being loaded, unless the current OS has been told to map a particular drive to a certain letter, but i dont think this carries over to different OSs (i'm assuming windows repair might count as a different OS)

you didnt specify how you mapped document libraries, i would have used ntfs junctions NOT environment variables

maybe... you can manually edit the registry file of metaphoric C to make sure the right drive devices are the right letters, assuming all this is stored in registry, but i wouldnt know where as i havent poked at this before, nor have i used process/registry monitor during a drive letter change to find out (i'm not on windows right now to be sure)

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Surely if you boot with just the ssd, when it boots you can change the drive letter to C then go from there, adding the other drives?

 

[SkyKast]

Sorry about the smileys, fixed. And I made a bold one line statement showing the drive letter changes, thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, I realized I screwed up, definitely regretting not just doing it through USB.
EDIT: This is why I couldnt use USB: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Incompatible+Disk+selected

I cannot boot the computer so is there something I can do with the OS drive to change the drive letter back to C from my laptop with the adapter? Will that work or is this a more permanent problem? I'm pretty sure you can change drive letters in disk manager without wiping the drive right?

 

[SkyKast]

Ok so I booted with just the system drive which magically is the C drive again and that worked except none of my files were there, so i added the D drive back and it booted with all my files so i added the new HDD via SATA 3 (where my old backup drive was) in order to clone it and it booted fine. It showed the new disk in disk manager so i figured I was good to go copying the data then right after I started the copy BSOD.

Now it boots with just C and D drive but BSOD soon after. "SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION"

This is really annoying I dont know what I'm doing wrong.

 

[SkyKast]

Now it blue screens every time I try to boot no matter what. Seems to be going downhill. newest one is "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT"

 

[jboydgolfer]

Just today about five hours ago I lost an operating system that I've been running for at least a few years and the back up for it which were all on my C Dr. I tried cloning My D drive to my C Dr. because my C dr os was win10, and I finally become fed up with windows 10 long boot times, and general slower performance for the Windows 7.

After the cloning process see Drive wouldn't boot, what I ended up doing was cutting my losses, installing a new Windows 7 on my C Dr. and then copying manually whatever I could save from my D Dr. in living with the end results. You may find yourself in a similar position soon enough. Personally this is why I keep multiple drives all my important files and photos are server backed up, my web browser's are all synced, so it doesn't matter if I uninstall the os all I have to do is sign into Firefox or chrome and all my bookmarks and passwords are restored.

So really the only thing I have left to do is download handful of programs that I like to keep wench Ninite downloads a lot of them in one fell swoop. my point being if you take the proper precautions even if you lose a drive or make a mistake and end up having to reinstall a fresh OS the hassle is really only minimal hopefully this doesn't happen to you though

 

[kn00tcn]

this is on an asus P5Q deluxe? dont scurr me, i got a P5Q-E overclocked that's been great for 7.5 years (my first thought was how the first sandy mobos had failing sata ports due to a flaw in the chipset so that's why i checked your specs)

also, i wouldnt trust SSDs to work properly on old mobos or sata versions

if you're booting with only C, your files are gone cuz you said you put them on D, so that makes sense

if the OS is detecting drives out of order during boot, that would explain the letters mixing up since you havent explicitly chosen the letter (maybe you should, go to computer management/disk manager)

another also, i dont believe in cloning OS drives, it just doesnt make sense, the drive model/capacity/firmware version/maybe even driver are all things you DONT want cloned... similarly, when you swap a motherboard, you should uninstall the hard drive controller drivers before you shut down the first time, so that the next boot on the new mobo will auto detect things, i've done this on winxp & win98, otherwise a bsod happens (a different one than yours, just something i'm reminded of)

edit: so like... shouldnt we prove that the mobo is stable? that the right sata ports work ok? that you're in ahci mode? that you went through all bios options to see if every sata port has the same settings? i guess sata #5 meant you're still on the intel controller rather than the silicon image one of the 2 orange ports

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

It used to be that a boot order in the BIOS was Floppy>CDD>HDD>Whatev. Now we can eliminate floppies and CDD's, so that just leaves up USB as default first boot device. I still have a DVDR installed but its no long part of the boot process. I had a similar issue a while ago when windows decided to change the boot order on me. I solved it by clearing CMOS (and reloaded saved settings) then removing the storage drives. I also checked the boot order each time I added a spare drive back, one by one. Havent had a problem since.

I hate windows when it decides change things "in my best interest", A-holes at m$ assumes everyone is stupid.

 

[SkyKast]

Thanks for the replies everyone

So I had to take a few days away from troubleshooting but trying again today I was able to boot (with only the C drive connected) and login and get to my blank desktop. It actually worked for long enough that I was able to copy the BSOD minidump files onto a flash drive but then it locked up (no BSOD). So I had to hard reset it, and from then on it would sometimes boot to login screen and sometimes BSOD during boot.

Part of my issue here is how erratic the issues are. Like why would it work ok for about 10 mins of first boot after a week of being off then slowly slide back to BSODing instantly during boot? Just makes no sense. And even less sense when considering the simple little thing that caused all this in the first place!

You may find yourself in a similar position soon enough.

yes this is probably true but if I do a fresh install and the problem persists I will be kicking myself for days so I want to exhaust all possibilities of a hardware issue first. I do agree with you that it isnt a massive loss since my data is backed up and I also used synced web browsers but its still hours and hours of installing software and plugins and codecs that I'd love to avoid, although at this point it may be quicker than troubleshootng, I'm somewhat determined to figure out what happened.

this is on an asus P5Q deluxe? dont scurr me, i got a P5Q-E overclocked that's been great for 7.5 years

yes it is, and mine has also been running strong for years, almost 10 years!!

also, i wouldnt trust SSDs to work properly on old mobos or sata versions

Interesting, I had no idea. My SSD has been working perfectly fine on this MOBO for a couple years now I believe

another also, i dont believe in cloning OS drives, it just doesnt make sense, the drive model/capacity/firmware version/maybe even driver are all things you DONT want cloned...

this is interesting and totally makes sense now that you say it! Although cloning to a new drive has saved hours and hours of work in the past, I can see your point.

edit: so like... shouldnt we prove that the mobo is stable? that the right sata ports work ok? that you're in ahci mode? that you went through all bios options to see if every sata port has the same settings? i guess sata #5 meant you're still on the intel controller rather than the silicon image one of the 2 orange ports

YES this is what I'm thinking. Im going to run a memtest to start

It used to be that a boot order in the BIOS was Floppy>CDD>HDD>Whatev. Now we can eliminate floppies and CDD's, so that just leaves up USB as default first boot device. I still have a DVDR installed but its no long part of the boot process. I had a similar issue a while ago when windows decided to change the boot order on me. I solved it by clearing CMOS (and reloaded saved settings) then removing the storage drives. I also checked the boot order each time I added a spare drive back, one by one. Havent had a problem since.

I hate windows when it decides change things "in my best interest", A-holes at m$ assumes everyone is stupid.

I'm not sure that my issue matches the problem you describe but its good to know a potential solution is resetting CMOS and adding the drives one by one. Thanks

 

[SkyKast]

OK so to test the hardware I started with a memtest since the most frequent BSOD was the MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error. The test is 2.5 hours in on its first pass and is still running, but an absurd amount of errors have been found. Hundreds of thousands actually lol. Ill post a picture but its pretty nuts.

Should I be led to believe this means I have bad RAM? All signs point to yes, I know, but how could that have been caused by just adding a HDD?? Unless I somehow fried another component via static or otherwise when I had the case open, I don't see how the issues could be related. It also still makes no sense how irregular the failures are and why would it even successfully boot once if the RAM was bad?

I guess I'll let the test finish unless you guys think its pointless and then retry the test with only 1 RAM stick in at a time to pinpoint the exact stick that's causing the errors, unless the test results could be pointing to a different hardware problem?

This machine level troubleshooting is clearly not my wheelhouse so sorry if I'm asking simple questions. Please add any comments/advice if you'd be so kind. I appreciate all of your time very much. Cheers

image free hosting

 

[kn00tcn]

remember how these old platforms work, the northbridge P45 chip is the memory controller AND ... well i forgot if southbridge does the sata on this platform, but the data still has to pass the northbridge

so, the more ram sticks you use, the more demand on the northbridge, the more voltage it needs or the more often instability will arise

the tighter the ram timings, the more demand on the northbridge again (EDIT: actually i think i meant 'tRD' aka 'performance level', this is a timing specific to the northbridge http://www.anandtech.com/show/2427/6 )

the hope is that you simply need a little more voltage on the NB or ram or both or looser ram timings or looser tRD timing, but the worst case is the mobo is physically failing (doubt it's the ram but that's possible sure... test each stick one by one in the same slot, when one fails, try another slot same stick, just be scientific & remove variables)

i remember halflife2 crashing a lot on an overclocked anthlonxp with ddr1 running in its spec, everything else was always stable, in my case it was solved by raising ram voltage by one or two ticks of .01v

 

[SkyKast]

Thanks for all the tips!

I did exactly as you recommended actually and tested each RAM stick individually and the first three had multiple errors, more than one hundred. The fourth actually passed the test. So I tried booting with just that one stick an just the C drive connected and it worked so I tried it with the D drive connected as well and it actually booted!! Its been up for an hour now and seems to be working fine. I had to reinstall Chrome for some reason to get it to work but everything else is working. Sooo I guess attaching my new HDD somehow fried 3 RAM sticks? That still makes no sense to me but ookay. Sad because I loved the LEDs on these Tracer Reds

Would it be worth it for me to try adding the other sticks and lowering their timings or do those memtest errors mean they are dead?

Thanks again.