SATA drive = no boot

[Silent Assasin]

Ok, so I've got a WD200GB SATA drive that's I've had for several months now. About a week ago, I turned on my computer and just after windows finished loading, usually where my logon screen comes up, Windows goes into CHSDSK and scans my E:/ drive (sata) for errors. This is after a week of not being used, and I know that last time before that, it was shut down properly. Well I don't worry bout it too much. Everything works fine for several days, but in this time the computer isn't shut down. I tend to leave it on for several days at a time then occasionally shut it down over night. So anyway, next time I boot it up, same thing happens, I let it go. Then when I start playin World of Warcraft, I get the blue screen of death but there is no error message, just a blue background on my main monitor and not even a signal on my second monitor. I reboot..... Now durring the POST, it hangs on the IDE detection and sits there untill I reboot or power down. It won't even let me into the boot sequance in the bios to let me choose where I want to boot from. All this happens before my floppy drive boots as well, so my Lifegaurd data recovery boot disk does nothing. Finally I powered down, unplugged sata drive and everything works fine. I do a virus scan, adware scan, etc. Norton picks up a trojan in javascript. I quarentine and delete it, but that didn't help anything.

Anyone have any ideas what's going on? Or I've also heard that sata drives are built to be able to "Hot swap" them while the computer is already booted. Does anyone know in which order I should plug in the cables though, power first or second? I was wondering if my sata drive will boot after Windows is already booted......

 

[Silent Assasin]

nothing?

although it may of fixed itself, yesterday after deleting that virus, I rebooted and it ran the DSKCHK thing again, but this time found several errors with my sata drive. After correcting the errors I rebooted again and everything booted normally, but since then I haven't had any probs but then again I haven't rebooted yet. Before the virus, it seemed like it would only screw up when the drive was already hot, such as a reboot right after it's been on for a while.

 

[Silent Assasin]

nope, it's still not booting. But it is only doing it on restarts after the drive is already hot, otherwise it boots just fine.

 

[aarmenaa]

See if you can access the SMART information on the disk. SpeedFan can do this for you if you don't have software for it already. Each drive is different, but on my drives I can get temperatures, CRC error rates and some other data error measurements. It may help determine if the it's a hardware issue or not.


EDIT:
I forgot to add, look for fields labeled like these:
-Raw read error rate
-Seek error rate
-Reallocated sector count
-Reallocated event count
-UltraATA CRC Error Rate
-Write error rate

These might explain why it won't come back on reboot:
-Spin up time
-Spin retry count

 

[Silent Assasin]

ok cool, but now what temps corespond to what parts? especailly temp3 It's extremely hot..... But all the others seem to be fine and normal.

 

[aarmenaa]

While the temperatures can be useful, that's not really the function we're looking for. There's a tab at the top of the SpeedFan windows, labeled S.M.A.R.T. We want to look there for those items I mentioned above.

To keep it short, Raw read error rate on my drive is 200, it's worst is 200, and the warn is 51. Just write this as 200/200/51. What we're looking for are values where the "worst" value is getting closer to the "warn" value.

EDIT:
The high temperature is probably your CPU, which should be hotter than the rest in most cases. No need to worry, most likely.