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Almost 2 years ago I built a custom desktop. This week it seems to be becoming inoperable. It's a dual boot system capable of booting to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. When I sat down at it the other night, I noticed Windows (8.1) complaining about broken links in my shortcuts. I soon discovered my F: drive (the main data drive) did not appear in "This PC." I thought maybe the drive failed, but I had some pending updates, so I rebooted. Rebooting took abnormally longer to happen. Programs that I personally set to launch at startup in the system tray never launched. I opened a File Explorer windows to view This PC and all the drives appeared, but the green progress bar indicating the loading of all the drives' info took many minutes to finish. The F: drive did appear, but the blue bar indicating how full it was never did. Interacting with the window put it into a (Not Responding) state. I wasn't able to open any files. Wondering if this was related to recent software changes, I powered down and booted into my Windows 7 drive instead. It got to the screen that allows me to select Windows 7 or 8, but once I selected 7, the screens went black and stayed that way. I was forced to do a hard shutdown. I tried Windows 8 one more time but had the same problems. So I shut it down and left it shutdown since.

If my F: drive were the problem, I wouldn't think the OSes (each are on their own separate drives) would have such trouble. My question is, what parts should I suspect of failing? How can I diagnose this? My best guess is that a drive bus on the MoBo could be bad, causing some of the drives to have trouble communicating. I've never had such catastrophic failure before other than what was obviously HDD related. Could a bad RAM stick cause this? Could the CPU be failing?

I can get specific part model identifiers if needed. I have a Gigabyte motherboard, an Intel i7 (one of the Haswell models) and four hard drives. There are 32 GB of that "Hyper Red" memory that Kingston makes. Each OS is on its own SSD drive made by Samsung in the neighborhood of 320 GB. The other two drives (F: and G:) are 3 TB SATA disks. One is my primary data drive and the other is its backup (I also use other backup methods). There are 32 GB of that "Hyper Red" memory that Kingston makes. I have a pretty decent NVIDIA graphics card made by PCN I believe. Corsair powersupply. Blu-Ray burner.

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    Have you tried to unplug the F: drive from the mobo and restart? I have seen some weird behavior caused by HDD failures. Also, If you can, try to boot into Linux from a USB drive. Let us know how that goes.
    – Cfinley
    Apr 16, 2015 at 20:03
  • I have not tried that. That's a good suggestion, and I will give it a shot when I'm at the box again.
    – bubbleking
    Apr 16, 2015 at 21:27
  • If it works, I will write an answer for you.
    – Cfinley
    Apr 16, 2015 at 21:30

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These issues can be hard to pin down. If you can, you should unplug as much as possible and then re-add things in a controlled fashion to track down the issue.

Having said that, by far the most likely issue is a hard drive. These fail with monotonous regularity. They rarely completely fail though. Common signs are unexpected slowdowns and system/application crashes. You should particularly note if there is a lot of disk activity without much to show for it.

You should run some disk diagnostics. Unfortunately the best tools are not free nor cheap. Spinrite from GRC is the best I've used but it is around USD90. However, it will often recover disks (even back to full health) where other applications fail.

UPDATE:

In regard to the query regarding Spinrite recovery. Many creeping disk errors seem to be related to drift of the HDD mechanism over time. Even a microscopic change to the alignment of the heads with the tracks on the platters is enough to reduce the signal strength and possibly result in errors. Spinrite is written with this in mind and uses a variety of techniques that I don't pretend to understand to help correct that issue not only managing to read very badly damaged data in the process but also realigning the tracks so signal strength returns to normal. So running Spinrite from time-to-time over an HDD can help reduce or remove creeping errors that are so common due to the ultra-high density of modern drives (especially the 2.5" laptop drives).

There are plenty of other modes of failure for drives that Spinrite cannot recover but even there it is very good at persevering and recovering everything it can.

The GRC website has the technical details that I've no doubt managed to mangle in an effort to describe it. What I can say is that it actually works and I've managed to recover some pretty mangled drives with it. It can however take a LONG time - I've seen it run for 3 weeks solid!! That time, I managed to recover some of the drive, not all.

Of course, since you have taken the eminently sensible precaution (read necessity) of taking a decent backup, you can simply buy a new disk as you say.

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  • Yes indeed, it was the hard drive. Removing it fixed all issues and adding it back made them return. I had just never seen such bizarre behavior from an HDD crash before so I jumped to the hasty conclusion that it was something else.
    – bubbleking
    Apr 20, 2015 at 3:35
  • I'm curious what you mean when you say this software can recover a disk back to full health. How can software repair a hardware failure? In any case, I am fairly sure my offsite backup is enough. I just need to buy a new disk to restore it to.
    – bubbleking
    Apr 20, 2015 at 3:37
  • That is some great extra info in the update. I am compelled to wonder if this type of software might help me get data from a HDD which was my mother's and which failed a few years ago with the only copies of many of her digital photos. I've been debating sending it to an expensive recovery service. Perhaps I should try this first.
    – bubbleking
    Apr 27, 2015 at 20:21
  • There is a reasonable chance that it could though the bearings might also be a little iffy after a few years. The real issue is that there are not guarantees. You could spend the money and it might not work. Still, I've not regretted the purchase. I don't use it often but when you need it, you REALLY need it. You can also run it preventively. Once every 6-12 months run it against any drives you have and it will help reset any creeping errors. Certainly cheaper than a recovery service. Apr 27, 2015 at 21:42

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