Computer Issue

Good evening all,

I have an interesting predicament going on here. A couple of weeks ago, I helped a family friend resurrect an old office PC from their small business. It's an old Dell Vostro with a Core 2-based Pentium. They just wanted a secondary family PC for their kids to use when they visited in town. So I put Windows 7 on it and got them a new Crucial MX100 128GB SSD. I installed Windows 7, and configured it and left. Everything ran just fine.

Fast forward a week, and I receive a call. Apparently the internet isn't working, and one of the family members started pulling plugs. After everything calmed down, and we figured out that their DSL modem lost signal (they're out in the boonies and apparently had an outage), they plugged the computer back in and... The computer won't boot Windows 7.

Now, I have not yet gone in person to see this problem. I got hit by the flu really bad, so I haven't been able to go over yet to personally asses the damage. But from what I can tell by talking over the phone, the PC is just stuck in a dead loop of booting. It will POST, and then try to boot Windows 7, but when the Windows 7 logo comes up, it restarts and tries again. I even had them try to boot into safe mode and it will not do it.

So, based on my limited information. Does this look like a potentially failed SSD? I'm wagering that it isn't - because the problem is too consistent for it to be a hardware problem. I'm guessing that in the frenzy of unplugging stuff, they may have accidentally corrupted their Windows 7 install... Or is that unlikely? Thanks guys! I appreciate any input you all can give on this. I just need some ideas to chew on before I go over there this weekend and see what's up.

Update (on said computer even):

Looks like the battery died and CMOS got reset. Because the computer is a bit old, the default settings for the PC is that the SATA adapter to be in IDE mode (I changed it to RAID - which enables ACHI). So I replaced the battery and set the SATA mode back to RAID and all is good. Embarrassed that I didn't think of that over the phone, but oh well. No failed SSD drives here.

Before the update I would have suggested corrupted OS.

alphahomersimpson said:

Before the update I would have suggested corrupted OS.

Click to expand...

Yeah definitely. It's what it was looking like. But lo and behold... I sometimes forget that there was once upon a time where the BIOS didn't default to ACHI but instead IDE mode.