It's worse than that its dead Jim

[tenpole]

A previously working PC the night before completely failed to boot into windows the next day. After the bios loads the screen just had a flashing cursor like it was waiting for an o/s to be loaded up.

So I went to the bios screen and on the board explorer the hard drive was not showing up in any of the hard drive ports, only the secondary drive. I unplugged all cables and plugged up the main hard drive into the cables that the secondary drive had been using. Boot to bios and again nothing showing. I double checked the cables by reconnecting the secondary drive to the sata and power cables. Sure enough it showed that this drive was present.

Is my diagnosis that the drive is knackered and needs replacing correct?

 

[tenpole]

This is the wifes pc.

 

[PliotronX]

Does the main drive happen to be a solid state drive? I only ever really see undetectable drive failures with no warning for SSDs. I personally have never worked on a mechanical drive that is suddenly undetectable, they get super slow and usually trip a SMART warning. If its under warranty, get that thing shipped out unless data is needed which is another decision to have a lab recover the data or try to use an identical drive off of fleabay to transfer the logic board..

 

[VirtualLarry]

It can happen. Usually... HDD drives die slowly, and not overnight, but it can happen. I had a GPU die overnight in my main rig. Left it one night, tried to wake it up the next morning, not detected as ANYTHING in the PCI-E slot. (Same symptoms in another PC, and yet, a different, working dGPU works in the first PC too.)

Not sure why, it was kind of sad. I generally don't "lose" parts like that. Usually, they just plain wear out over the years.

OP, was the failing drive an SSD, and how old was it?

 

[tenpole]

Does the main drive happen to be a solid state drive?

No this is the wifes' pc as the signature a 1tb Seagate barracuda.

I personally have never worked on a mechanical drive that is suddenly undetectable, they get super slow

The PC did have a slow down problem but I put this down to some software junk my daughter might have picked up. I checked the RAM , all past, checked the hard drive but it passed the scan. I cleaned up the registry, uninstalled software I did not recognize and it seemed to be running ok again.

If its under warranty, get that thing shipped out .

I would think it has run out, I got the drive in 2012.

 

[tenpole]

OP, was the failing drive an SSD, and how old was it?

Seagate barracuda 1tb 2012, I think it was 2012, haswell had just come out.

 

[UsandThem]

Seagate barracuda 1tb 2012, I think it was 2012, haswell had just come out.

Ah, a good 'ole Seagate. That explains it.

I've had two die without any warning before. One in a PC, and one in my son's Xbox One (used less than 3 months). Out of all the dying HDD threads over the years, Seagate comes up a lot.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, that's a good excuse for a brand-new SSD, and a fresh install of Windows.

 

[tenpole]

Well, that's a good excuse for a brand-new SSD, and a fresh install of Windows.

This is the wifes computer and I think she would struggle with The concept of saving data on a seperae hd. I am not buying a 1tb ssd. She can stick with a 1tb sata hd. On the subject of windows can I still upgrade her windows 8 to 10 as I had done previously. She actually liked windows 8 at the time. Did my head in.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, if she really needs 1TB of space on the C-colon drive, then yeah, your only choices are really a 1TB SSD (pricey!), or a 1TB HDD ($40 or so).

You should be able to upgrade your Windows 8/8.1 to 10 still. I did a few laptops with fresh SSDs and Win10 upgrades a few weeks ago. (They had Win8/8.1 keys in BIOS.)

 

[crashtech]

It's so easy to map Windows folders to other drives in such a way that is transparent to the user. Simply right click on the folder, choose Properties > Location and type in the desired path. This is routine for smallish SSD builds, and gets done to Downloads, Documents, Photos, etc.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If she doesn't game, get her a Chromebook from Costco. $300 OTD and you can replace it with a new one every couple years, no sweat.

And it'll run Android apps. And it's hackable if you're into that.

 

[tenpole]

New drive installed. Now with windows 10, took all day to get windows 10 installed. But it is done now.

 

[VirtualLarry]

took all day to get windows 10 installed

Aren't you glad you put in a HDD rather than an SSD?


/s

 

[tenpole]

Aren't you glad you put in a HDD rather than an SSD?


/s

It was the downloads which took the time. I tried upgrading to windows 10 straight from a disk windows 8 install but it kept asking for the serial number. I installed all the updates and after that it seemed to install fine.