troubleshooting Cycling BIOS

[Tarsh]

I have a ASUS B350 prime - plus motherboard. I had an issue today, not really sure what happened but it appears that I lost my mechanical drive and now when ever I try to start I am forced into BIOS it does not matter if I hit delete or not, and when I try to save and exit or discard and exit from BIOS it will just take me back to the BIOS screen this never ends. I have tried booting from my main SSD and from a CD disk but neither of those changed anything, neither did updating BIOS. Could the issue be my PSU had something give out and it took the hard drive with it? Or am I missing something here? I am fairly new to the computer building scene. 

 

-Tarsh

[anotherriddle]

Hi, I am sorry to hear you have problems. I need a few more infos about your setup:

• You say you try booting from your main SSD, does this mean you have your OS installed on the SSD?
• " it appears that I lost my mechanical drive and now when ever I try to start I am forced into BIOS " so I assume this is your second "data" drive? What makes you think it failed?

Edit: Additional question

• What kind of CD are you trying to boot from?

[Tarsh]

1 hour ago, anotherriddle said:

Hi, I am sorry to hear you have problems. I need a few more infos about your setup:

• You say you try booting from your main SSD, does this mean you have your OS installed on the SSD?
• " it appears that I lost my mechanical drive and now when ever I try to start I am forced into BIOS " so I assume this is your second "data" drive? What makes you think it failed?

 

Yes, I have had this rig running for a few months now, so windows 10 is on the 120 gb SSD

 

It no longer shows up, tried switching SATA cables, the last time I saw it at all; Task manager reported it at 100% usage with nothing being written or read to it.

 

[anotherriddle]

1 minute ago, Tarsh said:

Yes, I have had this rig running for a few months now, so windows 10 is on the 120 gb SSD

 

It no longer shows up, tried switching SATA cables, the last time I saw it at all; Task manager reported it at 100% usage with nothing being written or read to it.

 

So, the SSD does not show up any more or the hard drive?

When you say it does not show up I assume you mean in the Bios on the right side with the boot drives?

Can you describe the exact timeline of events? I am not quite sure I have the full picture yet.

[Tarsh]

The hard drive (extra storage, no OS) no longer shows up as a connected sata device. I still can select the ssd with OS as boot device. 

I left it in sleep overnight, when I woke up this morning everything seemed fine until I tried to play a game that was on the hard drive and was prompted to install game again. That is when I first noticed my drive was missing. I then restarted my computer to see check BIOS and see if the drive is still being recognized by MB. ( the restart was taking forever and I forced it off). Started it up again and Windows said it was doing drive repair to my C: drive which I thought was odd. When I eventually get into windows I can see the E: drive as local disk but no data can be accessed and eventually it just disappears. I do that twice. Then I am going in BIOS and trying to see is there was an option messing with something, as I was running a modest OC. After looking at FAQ and trying the above it just ended up in a cycle of BIOS. (Those two reboots were lucky and on the second time it was extremely slow and unresponsive the only thing that moved was the mouse. 

I hope this helps

 

[anotherriddle]

1 hour ago, Tarsh said:

 

okay, so I assume your motherboard is back in factory defaults, right? (clarification: Bios version does not matter, I mean that it is not overclocked and ram is at default speed)

I would proceed this way: When the PC is shut down remove all storage devices by unplugging the sata cables (also the CD one), remove flash drives, except the ssd with your OS (make sure it is plugged in firmly, power and sata)

Boot your PC and check if the SSD shows up in BIOS, first on the right where the boot devices are, if not, then under Advanced Mode -> Advanced -> sata -> configuration (you probably need to scroll down) and check if any device description shows up.

Another question in the mean time: Do you have a modular power supply?

 

If you have access to another PC you can make a live USB drive or CD (any Linux distro) and try to boot from that (if you want to make sure it is not a strange problem with the board. But I do not think it is something like that, lets check the more probable failures first.)

[Tarsh]

10 minutes ago, anotherriddle said:

 

Yes so everything is running on defaults, 

The power supply is an old one that came with the case, I think (I use a lot of secondhand parts) so it is not modular

I did everything like you said, I can see the SSD in the SATA configuration, but nothing has changed. 

 

[anotherriddle]

1 minute ago, Tarsh said:

I did everything like you said, I can see the SSD in the SATA configuration, but nothing has changed. 

 

That is okay, this was not supposed to change anything, but now we know the drive works but is not recognized as a boot device. The most likely scenario is that windows was updating/changing something when you forced it off, although it is strange that it kind of worked for two further reboots.

I believe the OS drive is corrupted in some way but I think it may be possible to recover from this with a recovery disk. The problem is Windows 10 is not my forte, maybe someone else on this forum can help with that.

Regarding the other drive not showing up:

You can try mounting it in another PC and view the SMART data, it is possible the drive itself has a problem (what is the type of drive and how old is it?)

It is also possible that an aging power supply can cause this behaviour.

 

I will probably reply tomorrow, it is quite late where I am.