Permabanned
- Joined
- 6 Feb 2009
- Posts
- 79
Hi,
I apologise if this post is lengthy and nonsensical; there are so many weird things happening that it is hard to put it into words.
My PC is actually primarily a Hackintosh, but that is not the issue. I do have a hard drive in my PC that runs Windows, and I recently upgraded that to a 256GB Crucial SSD. I was running Windows 7 on my old drive, but wanted to run Windows in UEFI mode, like I run OS X. So I got a copy of Windows 8.1 along with the SSD.
I got Windows installed, in UEFI mode. I installed my usual array of applications that I use on Windows. I then left it alone for a couple of days.
When I came to boot Windows up so that I could use a Western Digital diag tool to zero some hard drives I am selling, it refused to boot up. It would get to the spinning dots bit and just freeze. Occasionally it would actually get past that and boot up and work, but 90% of the time, I couldn't boot the system. There were no errors, neither on screen at the time of booting nor in the event logs.
What was weird was, I could use VMWare on OS X and boot the drive as a virtual machine; and that worked every time.
The SSD was connected to the Marvell controlled SATA ports on my motherboard (Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H), and would appear in Windows as a SCSI drive. I thought perhaps that might have been causing the issue. So I connected the drive to one of the Intel controlled SATA ports.
Success, the computer booted flawlessly. I rebooted it 10 times in a row and every time it booted, the problem appeared to be fixed!.
So I go about my business and started zeroing a hard drive using the WD diag tool. I left the computer and didn't touch it again for around 24hrs.
When I came back to it, I switched on the screen and the system had BSOD with error 0xc000021a. It said it was 'trying to collect some error info and then you can restart 0% complete'. Obviously it never collected any of that information as it was stuck on 0%.
When trying to restart the computer, I now got a couple of BSODs on boot up.
The first I didn't have enough time to write the whole thing down as it rebooted on me half way through writing:
0xc0000185
A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.
I pressed enter to try again, and got another message, which I was unable to write down as it rebooted quickly, but it was something along these lines:
The application or operating system could not be located because a required file is missing.
Then it referred to boot.efi if I recall correctly.
Then the computer shut down.
When I tried rebooting the computer again, the hard drive had totally disappeared, like it wasn't even being recognised in the BIOS. I would shut the computer down and switch it back on and it would reappear, but I was unable to boot from it.
I booted in OS X and tried booting from VMWare, which worked, but again could not boot directly from the drive.
So then I tried swapping the SATA cable, and it came back to life. I was able to boot into Windows first time.
Silly me didn't try rebooting again, instead I started the disk-zeroing app again as I plan to walk away from the computer for a couple of hours to see if it is stable. It is half way through now so might as well let it continue.
So does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? The obvious options are:
1. Faulty SATA cable
2. Corrupt EFI partition (but one would think if it was corrupt, it wouldn't boot at all)
3. Faulty SSD
SMART status checks out ok but don't think that really means much does it?
Thanks for any advice.
I apologise if this post is lengthy and nonsensical; there are so many weird things happening that it is hard to put it into words.
My PC is actually primarily a Hackintosh, but that is not the issue. I do have a hard drive in my PC that runs Windows, and I recently upgraded that to a 256GB Crucial SSD. I was running Windows 7 on my old drive, but wanted to run Windows in UEFI mode, like I run OS X. So I got a copy of Windows 8.1 along with the SSD.
I got Windows installed, in UEFI mode. I installed my usual array of applications that I use on Windows. I then left it alone for a couple of days.
When I came to boot Windows up so that I could use a Western Digital diag tool to zero some hard drives I am selling, it refused to boot up. It would get to the spinning dots bit and just freeze. Occasionally it would actually get past that and boot up and work, but 90% of the time, I couldn't boot the system. There were no errors, neither on screen at the time of booting nor in the event logs.
What was weird was, I could use VMWare on OS X and boot the drive as a virtual machine; and that worked every time.
The SSD was connected to the Marvell controlled SATA ports on my motherboard (Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H), and would appear in Windows as a SCSI drive. I thought perhaps that might have been causing the issue. So I connected the drive to one of the Intel controlled SATA ports.
Success, the computer booted flawlessly. I rebooted it 10 times in a row and every time it booted, the problem appeared to be fixed!.
So I go about my business and started zeroing a hard drive using the WD diag tool. I left the computer and didn't touch it again for around 24hrs.
When I came back to it, I switched on the screen and the system had BSOD with error 0xc000021a. It said it was 'trying to collect some error info and then you can restart 0% complete'. Obviously it never collected any of that information as it was stuck on 0%.
When trying to restart the computer, I now got a couple of BSODs on boot up.
The first I didn't have enough time to write the whole thing down as it rebooted on me half way through writing:
0xc0000185
A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.
I pressed enter to try again, and got another message, which I was unable to write down as it rebooted quickly, but it was something along these lines:
The application or operating system could not be located because a required file is missing.
Then it referred to boot.efi if I recall correctly.
Then the computer shut down.
When I tried rebooting the computer again, the hard drive had totally disappeared, like it wasn't even being recognised in the BIOS. I would shut the computer down and switch it back on and it would reappear, but I was unable to boot from it.
I booted in OS X and tried booting from VMWare, which worked, but again could not boot directly from the drive.
So then I tried swapping the SATA cable, and it came back to life. I was able to boot into Windows first time.
Silly me didn't try rebooting again, instead I started the disk-zeroing app again as I plan to walk away from the computer for a couple of hours to see if it is stable. It is half way through now so might as well let it continue.
So does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? The obvious options are:
1. Faulty SATA cable
2. Corrupt EFI partition (but one would think if it was corrupt, it wouldn't boot at all)
3. Faulty SSD
SMART status checks out ok but don't think that really means much does it?
Thanks for any advice.
