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ALienBC

ALienBC

ALienBC

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Joined
16 Jan 2003
Posts
170
Please :)

Just sanity-checking my logic here.

So, have a 6-7 year old build, Gigabyte Z77 DH3, i5 etc. Running Windows 7.

Recently, came back from work, turned it on, attempted to do more work (Excel... ugh) and it locked up, hard. Had to pull power.

On reboot... Windows can't load. Error in winload.exe. Eeek. I went thru a bunch of steps, including rerbuilding BCD, and I eventually managed to get it to boot Windows. Couple of minutes in.. bluescreen, hard boot required, back to square one. Winload.exe is corrupt, etc.

This PC also has other Windows installs. On separate drives. Two Win 7, one Win XP. So I tried rebooting into those other OSs. Same deal, Some kinda problem with the bootloader.

So, three OSs and three drives dead, in the space of an hour?

I'm thinking, something on the mobo has died. IO controller chip, whatever. It's a Gigabyte ultra durability. Oh the irony.

Does that make sense to you guys/gals? I stuck the main OS drive in a caddy to access it on a laptop, and after a couple of minutes it became unreadable. I tried the powercycle trick, and no joy. I can read the data drive that was in the dead PC, but the OS drives... no.

On that PC, I have one course of action left: I have a spare SSD, so I could try reinstalling Windows, but I don't really want to brick a rand new SSD if it's something fundamental on the mobo that has failed.

What do you think? Is it new mobo time? *especially painful because that also means new CPU and RAM...)

Thx :)
abc
 
If the drive you moved into a caddy became problematic away from the initial system doesn't that point to a problem with that drive, given that the other(data) drive didn't pose any of those problems.

I could certainly be wrong, but it seems you've already narrowed the cause of the issues down.

I know it sucks if you have lots of data on there you don't want to lose, but based on what you've said the drive seems the cuplrit(so test a spare inside the problem system with another OS install if that possible and see if the issues go away).
 
Well, I'm thinking more along the lines of, whatever went wrong on the first PC has caused the drive to break. I don't think the drive broke and then the ability to boot failed, because I had three separate OS drives fail simultaneously: I couldn't boot into any of them. While I do have a spare disk I can try another install on, it's quite a nice SSD and I don't want to risk bricking that one too :)

My data is mostly safe (big silver lining) - it's just the pain of reinstalling everything... especially audio software, plugins and all that jazz. Hey ho!
 
I've had the same issue as you are describing late last week.
PC would only boot into Windows after a complete shut down and even then it would work for half an hour.

Clean Windows install didn't solve it either, the culprit was my 7 years old M4 crucial SSD
 
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