PC won't boot

I

iron

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Mar 7, 2010
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After gaming on the PC for a few hours I decided to take a break. When I opened up "My Computer" in Windows 7 I noticed one of my hard drives had disappeared. Thinking it was just a glitch, I tried to restart. Upon restart, the BIOS took forever to complete (the disappeared hard drive wasn't in the listed drives) and the computer got stuck at the "Starting Windows" screen. I hard shut down the PC, opened up the case, used canned air to clear the dust out and made sure all devices were snugly in place. I hooked everything up and powered on. This time, after a few seconds the computer restarted, then nothing showed up on screen, not even the BIOS.

What happened? PSU died? Did it take everything with it? :(

PC Specs:

Windows 7 Professional
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz, not over clocked)
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (Rev. 2)
XFX PVT71PUDP3 GeForce 7900GS
FSP Group SAGA+ 450R 450W ATX12V Power Supply
3GB RAM
3 Hard drives
 
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sounds like a hard drive failed, but that doesnt sound like the whole problem. might be PSU releated.

it would be hard to diagnose without having the PC in front of me. take it to a buddy that knows computers and can test each part independantly to check it.

to save the rest of your system or whats left of it you should not boot it back up till you can have your friend check it with a good PSU first. If it boots then its the PSU, if not then the damage might already be done.

the go about checking the hard drives, then video card. ram/cpu/mobo testing have a chance to fry the system they are in if they are toasted so keep that in mind.
 
You can unplug the hard drive and try to get into BIOS. Same with the RAM.

Also if you have onboard video you can remove the graphics card.

Else you're looking at a bad PSU, mobo, or CPU
 
So, I got my new PSU today. Everything ~seems~ to be working except one of the hard drives. It shows up in Windows 7 but thinks the drive needs to be formatted. Is there a way to recover the data from the hard drive first?

Also, should I got through any procedures in verifying the integrity of the components or just assume the parts that work are going to work?
 
you can run the tests mentioned in the basic troubleshooting guide to test your other parts.

try something like getdataback or spinrite to recover your data. just make sure not to write to that drive at all, and recovery should be possible.
 
Most likely your hard drive is bad. Download Seatools, burn to a disk, boot from it, and test that drive. If it has any errors, then find HDDRegenerator, boot to it, and attempt to repair any bad sectors. Then you should be able to recover any available data. After that, throw the drive in your closet in case you ever find you need anything from it.
 
RAM tested with MemTest+, 2 passes, no errors.
Windows Check disk on functioning hard drives, no errors.
Ran Geoforms on graphics card, no strange behavior
Ran prime95 and othos for about 30mins, no errors.

Now, the broken hard drive:

Specs: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB 32MB Cache SATA (link)

------------------------------------------------------
All recovery programs I've looked at so far keep thinking the hard drive is about 33.4MB large, with a Cylinders-Heads-Sectors of 64-16-63. In reality its 1TB.
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GetDataBack seemed to do the best, recognized the actual size of the drive:

Step 1
Start: Cyl 0 Head 1 Sector 1
End: Cyl 1023 Head 254 Sector 63
LBA start: 63
Total sectors: 1,953,520,002
Bootable: No

Step 1/During scan

Many:
I/O Error 'Unknown error (65284)' reading sector XXXX on HD129.
until I choose 'Yes to all'

Index Allocs: 66
Boot sectors: 1
Files identified: 2 starts, 0 usrdef
MFT entries: 0,0 $MFT

Step 2 - Select File System
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/2539/step2c.png

Step3 - Recovery Tree
No files listed....


testdisk did the 2nd best, it was able to recognize the hard drive was 1TB big. Although says it can't recover the partition.

Spinrite noticed the different sizes/partition of the drive. Wasn't able to run recovery on the drive, even after all its warnings that I shouldn't ;)

Ultimate Boot CD didn't seem to want to load any of its programs... Although, Ultimate Boot CD for Windows' utilities worked.

Western Digital's WinDlg was only able to scan the 33.4MB limited space. The quick and extended test, and SMART all return no errors.

HDTune only recognizes 33.4MB, no errors, health OK, able to read temperature.

and so forth.

Scenario 1
The hard drive is still in its 3 year warranty period. Although I have never RMA'd a hard drive before, I don't know the extent of their fixing abilities. Maybe they could replace the chip? The platters itself should be ok...

or

Scenario 2
I could format the hard drive, then try to recover data again, while hoping for the best....

or

Scenario 3
Use testdisk to manually set the 'geometry' (Cylinder-Heads-Sectors) of the drive, although I don't know them. May foobar things more?

or something else!
 
If you format the drive, the data will be lost. RMA will only replace the drive, not repair it. I have no experience with testdisk. I'm not sure why the drive is only being detected as 33.4MB, sorry. Check with the storage subforum guys.
 
That means it can last 11 years of constant use at 77F.
Click to expand...

MTBF is in my opinion a totally useless and overestimated statistic. By no means does it mean your drive will last 11 years. You are lucky if it makes it 7 years. Either way a drive can die at any time. Whether its 1 day old or 7 years old. With that said if a drive makes it 6 months (high infant mortality rate) it will generally make it at least 3 years. After that all bets are off. And this comes from 13 years of work experience with 100s of drives.
 
Yeah, I don't expect it to survive that long, even half of that would have been nice. :)

Ironically, its been about 6-7 months now for the hard drive.

Additionally, the only part that was damaged was the hard drive, everything else seemed to survive.

Is it safe to test the suspect PSU?
 
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