Windows 7: Win7 and bios can't find drives, even while PC running

I'm not sure where to put this one as it involves several things.

So my system (updated specs in my profile) has been running perfectly since first built in January.

Saturday, a Steam update came out. Ever since then, I have had major problems. It starts with the entire system totally freezing and occasionally BSOD.



If I reset (hardware reset button), then bios can't find any of my hard drives (two different SATA channels), but it can usually find the DVD (also SATA). Sometimes it will hang on the drive part of boot up. (ACHI mode is enabled.)

If I do a cold boot (hardware off, wait 15 seconds, then on), then it boots and runs fine... for about an hour, maybe two... then the above happens again. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, games, surfing, or not even at my computer.

I did notice that the drives were running much slower than normal, so I updated the Intel Response Time thing (whatever you call it). That greatly improved drive response and boot time. But it did not cure the crashes.

Other than verifying all the case wires were firmly connected, I haven't had time to do anything else.

I can't imagine how a software update (Steam) could frack up my bios or my mb, but that is the only thing that has changed between running perfectly to totally unstable.

Once i get home, I'm planning to uninstall steam and reinstall. I'm not confident that will help if the update has caused another problem.

I don't know if it's Windows 7, Steam, hardware, or a bios issue. I have tech support calls out to Gigabyte and Steam, but I'm not confident of a quick response.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried system restore?

The BSoDs are going to be your key, so look into the codes those are showing. If you know the rough date and time, you can get them from your Event Viewer.

Try turning off or uninstalling the Intel bloatware - unless you're overclocking you only need the driver itself for best performance in Windows 7.

Test your HD's, establish a Clean Boot and work through the other steps in Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

OK. So far, I have

1) reset the system to a restore point from last week. That had no effect as the system froze a bit later, while looking to download the latest Intel drivers.

2) That removed Steam as well.

3) Verified that all hard disk and ACHI drivers were the most recent. That didn't help either.

4) Reset the bios.

5) moved the SATA cords to another plug in. I only have one space SATA3 plug, but two spare SATA2 plugs.

So far, the system is running OK. That doesn't mean anything as it usually takes an hour to fail. I ran the Prime95 Torture test for about 20 minutes and it seemed to hold up OK. But that's not really a disk I/O test.

So, I'm going to hold what I have and see if it fails on me.

I'm not sure the event log will be all that useful. It just contains the aftermath of the events. I'm not sure where the memory dumps go, but I've seen that happen 2-3 times yesterday. I don't see anything that seems like a precursor to the fail, just x service stopped unexpectedly.

I'll let you know what happens.

Windows dumps are located in C:/windows/minidump You'll have to provide administrator permission, but copy the dumps and paste them to somewhere easy to find like the desktop. Right click the and select send to then compressed(Zip) folder and include them in your next post. Steam by default wants to start with windows. Hold the windows key ( the one with the flag on it) Hold it down and press R. In the box type msconfig, go to the start up tab and uncheck Steam and any other thing you don't need to start at startup. You can still use them, but they won't automatically start with windows. You really only need your A/V to start.

I think I have discovered the problem. Check my thinking on this.

So, when I reset with the SSD in SATA_0, no drives appear during the AHCI part of the boot process.

When I move the SSD to SATA_1 and leave SATA_0 empty, then during a reset, the SATA_0 drive spot appears (correctly as no drive) and then nothing else appears during the boot process.

The other thing that I noticed is that during the last couple of fails, the HDD light (connected to the SSD drive) has been lit and remained lit as if there is a massive amount of data flowing to and from it... but nothing is actually happening.

With that discovery, I'm confident that the SSD is failing or has some other issue that is causing the problem. Unfortunately, 2 hours of effort last night and I still can't get the SSD firmware updated. It has a 3year warranty and is only 6 months old.

Try connecting another drive to port 0 and the SSD to another port and see if the same situation occurs. Also, when you say that the SSD can't be seen during the boot screen if connected to port 0, does your computer boot into windows? If you determine it is the SSD, Crucial tech support will RMA it with no problem, however they will have you try some things first to make sure it is the SSD. But, they are pretty easy to get along with.

Got it sorted. Thanks everyone.

Turns out the Crucial M4 SSD had a known flaw where it pretty much freaked out after 5000 hours of use. A power cycle and a firmware update and it's back to stable (so far).

Thanks for your help everyone.