Stubborn ADATA SU650 preventing POST

[RyLeo154]

Good morning/afternoon/evening, folks!

 

Got a rather tough nut to crack here:

Came home from school, tried to power on my PC and despite a short beep (successful power-on) from the speaker, it got stuck on the POST splash screen (the one with Del > Setup and F12 > More Boot Options) after a torturously long time on a black screen with an underscore on it.

 

Troubleshooting:

Since the speaker gave only a single, short happy beep, 

- I initially suspected that one of my RAM sticks were acting up again (rarely, one of them can decide not to boot), but after disconnecting unnecessary components (GPU, SSDs, Ethernet and all USBs minus keyboard and mouse), but it quickly booted and POSTed just fine, so RAM isn't the issue.

- Next, GPU. My previous build (only the SSDs were carried forward to my current build; the previous GPU was a Palit GTX 1070 Dual in case anyone's curious) had some serious issues where it occasionally wouldn't properly initialize the GPU; the GPU's fans would spin once I powered on the mobo, but no output. However, removing the 3060 Ti and running the display off the onboard graphics also allowed it to go straight into the PC

- My next suspicion was a corrupted BIOS, and my god, it was a nightmare to figure out how to flash it; downloaded the BIOS on Chrome from Gigabyte's website onto my phone, unzipped and copied its contents to a USB 2.0 flash drive, tried to flash and surprise! "Invalid version ID." Tried a few more times with the most recent version - redownload, extract, copy, throw it onto the motherboard, didn't work even with Q-Flash Plus, it just didn't want to re-flash itself. It might have something to do with the fact that the version I wanted to flash was the same thing as the current version installed, but eh, I didn't have any other ways to solve this issue, besides, the current BIOS is still working for now, so I just left it as-is.

- And finally, drives! Removed the M.2 and both SSDs, booted just fine. Put all three back on, bam, its stuck again. But I do know which stinker to root out: historically, ever since I got my SU650, it's been nothing but trouble - it rarely threw massive fits while in my previous build, sometimes outright refusing to be detected after a tediously long "look-at-the-POST-screen" staring contest, probably trying to initialize the drive until it gave up; problem was, it also happened to be my boot drive. Health? Hard Disk Sentinel mentioned it was working just fine a few months ago just before I built my current rig, so having it suddenly going kaput during that time wasn't something - I think - is likely, especially considering it last worked last night (see below). Removed the SU650, attached the SN720 and A55, booted quickly into Windows as it should.

 

The last time it was working was roughly 22 hours ago, when I Parsec'ed into my PC, did some light gaming, then powered it off. Came back from school the following day, dead.

 

Long story short, if I plug in the SU650, the mobo waits literally forever to intialize the disk - I know the system hasn't completely bricked itself because the keyboard lights still respond while "stuck" on the splash screen.

 

Is it a dead disk at this point, or might it have something to do with SATA configurations in the BIOS, similar to how some GPUs need to run on PCIE Gen3 instead of PCIE Gen4? RMA isn't an option since warranty for it expired April 2022, so I could just get another SSD if need be, but man, some important personal memories are still on it, including a few projects. Hoping for some help if anyone's offering any advice, thanks in advance!!

 

 

 

And yes, only recently did I learn that the SU650 (and the A55) do[es]n't even have a DRAM cache, I got them in late 2019 and mid-2020, way way before I learned DRAM caches were a thing that heavily impacted performance in SSDs from starting to watch LTT videos in late 2022... ah well, its a learning experience, at least!