HDD died now can't boot to anything?

[leglez]

Well a few days ago my computer shut down on its own. Upon rebooting it gave me a flashing underline after passing the bios. I figured my 150GB raptor finally died as it has been making tons of noise lately. I removed the raptor and replaced it with a 1TB Samsung drive. I put my windows disc in and now after passing the bios it still gives a flashing underscore. I have selected to boot from the disc, and it still does it. I borrowed a friends external DVD drive today thinking maybe it was my dvd drive. But now with the external dvd drive it is doing the same thing. Anyone have any ideas?

My setup:
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-Pro
CPU: i5-2500K
8GB of RAM, can't remember brand or model number

Could this possibly be a motherboard problem? Anything else I can try?

 

[Ken g6]

Tried unplugging every drive but the DVD drive?

 

[leglez]

I unplugged everything except for the DVD drive and now I am getting the error:

Reboot and select proper boot device. Or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key.

 

[mfenn]

Reseat the DVD drive connection. Also try a different physical disc.

 

[leglez]

I reseated the dvd drive connection. I also tried booting ubuntu from a USB drive and it worked fine. I don't have any other physical discs. I am going to try to have a friend stop by with a windows laptop to try and make a bootable USB drive with windows 7 on it and see if that helps.

 

[leglez]

Hmm well got it booting windows 7 installer via a USB drive. But now it is giving me the "windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style." error. I booted into Gparted, erased the drive and then formatted as NTFS. Then booted back to the windows 7 installer and its still giving me the same error.

 

[denis280]

Clear CMOS

 

[piasabird]

Maybe it is a bad power supply??

From what you described it sounds exactly like the symptoms of a power supply going bad.

Just trying to rule out all possibilities. It is unlikely that all the drive ports died at once unless it is the power supply, the motherboard or the CPU. It just seems like the power supply is the next thing to check.

 

[mfenn]

Hmm well got it booting windows 7 installer via a USB drive. But now it is giving me the "windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style." error. I booted into Gparted, erased the drive and then formatted as NTFS. Then booted back to the windows 7 installer and its still giving me the same error.

Just formatting a partition won't change the partition table type. Go back to Ubuntu, open a terminal and do:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda
o
p
(should print an empty table)
w

That'll put a blank MBR-style partition table on your drive. Then you should be able to boot the Windows installer and let it take care of the rest.