I think Ive just had a HD die on me out of the blue.
First thing I noticed last night was that the HD had disappeared from windows. It wasnt a boot drive and in fact I was going to format it and remove it from the PC completely and use it as a backup drive with a dock.
But today I rebooted the PC and windows7 refused to load! Stuck on the windows boot screen with a very slight regular clicking sound coming from the PC case. I thought okay maybe it was a registry edit I did that fubared it up (I wanted to remove the annoying System Reserved drive win7 made using "NoDrives" registry key). So I tried to get into safe mode, didnt work as well would just hang during loading!
So then after about 1.5 hours trying to find out and attempt to edit the registry from outside of windows using all sorts of boot discs I decided to try a system restore. Loaded the win7 disc and chose repair and it first didnt detect a windows partition AND took 20 mins to do that with the same clicking sound!
I was really frustrated, but as it took so long I thought maybe its looking at other hard drives, so I unplugged all of them except my SSD boot drive.
Within a second it found the partition and told me there was a boot error, fixed the error, I reboot and windows loads fine with no problems.
So I connected all the other drives except the one that disappeared and everything is working fine again now, but such a waste of 2 hours of a Sunday!
How can a non-boot drive affect win7 that much?
Also anyone else had similar annoying HD failures?
First thing I noticed last night was that the HD had disappeared from windows. It wasnt a boot drive and in fact I was going to format it and remove it from the PC completely and use it as a backup drive with a dock.
But today I rebooted the PC and windows7 refused to load! Stuck on the windows boot screen with a very slight regular clicking sound coming from the PC case. I thought okay maybe it was a registry edit I did that fubared it up (I wanted to remove the annoying System Reserved drive win7 made using "NoDrives" registry key). So I tried to get into safe mode, didnt work as well would just hang during loading!
So then after about 1.5 hours trying to find out and attempt to edit the registry from outside of windows using all sorts of boot discs I decided to try a system restore. Loaded the win7 disc and chose repair and it first didnt detect a windows partition AND took 20 mins to do that with the same clicking sound!
I was really frustrated, but as it took so long I thought maybe its looking at other hard drives, so I unplugged all of them except my SSD boot drive.
Within a second it found the partition and told me there was a boot error, fixed the error, I reboot and windows loads fine with no problems.
So I connected all the other drives except the one that disappeared and everything is working fine again now, but such a waste of 2 hours of a Sunday!
How can a non-boot drive affect win7 that much?
Also anyone else had similar annoying HD failures?