No boot devices with second hard drive attached

MajesticDonkey

Relevant specs:
CPU: Intel i7 4770k (not OC'd)
RAM: 16GB Kingston HyperX @2400Mhz
Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth Z87
PSU: Superflower 1000W (80 Plus Gold)
HDD: 1TB WD Black

The PC itself is about 3 months old, built by myself. All the above I bought new when I was building.

My primary boot device is a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO, which is about 8 months old. I use a 1TB WD Black hard drive for most of my data which works fine all the time.

The new hard drive was filling up, so I decided to attach my old 1TB Samsung HD-something-or-other hard drive (about 7 years old), which WAS the primary boot device of my old PC. This worked fine until about a month ago when my PC would hang on the "Starting Windows" screen, unless the SATA cable for the Samsung HDD was plugged out. With the drive attached, I can only load into the BIOS (which takes forever), and there is no SSD and no hard drives listed in the boot menu, which is strange when I can actually boot to the Windows loading screen where it hangs.

This was very intermittent - sometimes unplugging the drive and reconnecting it would sort the issue and I could boot. Today I can't boot no matter what I try.

The Samsung drive was never formatted before connecting it. Could this have caused issues with the bootloader? If so, why would it have worked at all? I have since deleted all the old Windows files from the hard drive (when it worked), and I had checked in the Disk Management section which showed only the SSD set with the BOOT flag.

I have since put a lot of data on this hard drive which I can't really afford to lose. I have no issue buying another hard drive if that's the issue, but at the moment I'd just like to know how to get the data off it if possible.

Thanks for any help.

MajesticDonkey

To add to the above, something I didn't think of til now...if I leave some USB stick plugged in (a 64GB Kingston USB3.0 for example) when turning on my PC, the same thing happens. I haven't checked available boot devices or anything like that, but I do know it just hangs at the Windows loading screen the same as above.

PropJoe10

Regarding getting the data off the old hard drive, if it was me I would probably boot into a Linux live CD and access the drive from there, and pull all the data off it, then format it and move the data back to remove any trace of boot files on the old drive. Its strange that you had no issues for a while and then problems started, but the best guess there is the BIOS getting mixed up between bootloaders on your two drives. The only real way to establish whether thats the problem would be to do the above, then format your SSD and do a fresh install and see how you go.

maki

There's no need to do a full format. The BIOS only cares about sector 0 on the drive, which you can modify using something like EasyBCD.
Not to mention that the BIOS should ignore any other devices once the bootstrap from the primary device has been loaded into RAM.

A more worrying sign is that you're also getting it when using a USB device.
First thing I'd do is see if there are any BIOS updates, and/or reset the BIOS settings to default. Failing that you've either found a bug in the BIOS, or else you've got a hardware issue with your motherboard.

MajesticDonkey

Thanks lads.

I'll give the live CD a go anyway to get the data off it, format it, and try again.

There doesn't appear to be any new BIOS updates available, because I updated everything straight after turning it on first time. I might try resetting it to safe defaults also if formatting the Samsung HDD doesn't help. The USB issue is worrying, yes, but I can live with it as I can just remove the USB stick when I turn off the PC. That's as long as the problem doesn't get worse.

MajesticDonkey

So I was able to boot into the PC last night again with the Samsung drive attached. I used EaseUS Partition Master to look at the drive and it turns out there was still an MBR/Boot partition on the drive which the Windows Disk Management interface didn't show for some reason. I removed it and resized the primary partition to fill all available space, and took the chance of not backing up the data on it.

I haven't gotten the chance yet to see if this has fixed the issue, but I plan on doing that this evening. I've ordered myself a new 2TB WD Green drive anyway, because the Samsung drive is pushing on 8 years old so it mightn't have an awful amount of life left in it