2nd Disk Drive Causes Boot to Hang

Alright so, here's a rundown

Built a new computer using a 120GB SSD as the "main drive" where I installed Windows 7. Then for storage I have a 1TB HDD. I had these two drives running side by side just fine for quite a while (over a month at least).

Then suddenly, yesterday, I installed a few windows updates that had been sitting in my task bar for quite a while. I rebooted, but it hung at the "Starting Windows" screen. I rebooted it again in safe mode and found it was hanging at classpnp.sys (or rather, the file that comes after it - disksomething.sys or something like that).

After much tooling around, I came to find that I was able to get the PC to boot by disconnecting the HDD. I don't think the HDD is bad or dead, though I have nothing to back up that belief. But it had been working perfectly fine and wasn't exhibiting any of the signs of a dying hard drive - slowness, clicking, etc.

I've tried a lot of things to fix this:

- system restored to 2 days ago
- changed settings around in BIOS (particulary the IDE/AHCI setting - changing it to AHCI gave me BSODs so I left it on IDE)
- updated the BIOS to the latest version
- tried multiple ports/cables for both drives

I read somewhere else (though I don't have a link) where someone said something about Windows 7 having problems with PCs that have both a HDD and an SSD in the same build, so I really think that has something to do with this.

So um... any suggestions?

ICit2lol said:

Hello and welcome Mike I shall assume you have the SSD set as the boot drive?

There is this too Windows 7 fails to go into safe mode. Stuck at classpnp.sys

and you might try a look at this too Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

Hey, thanks for the response. I haven't tried to mess with it for the past few days just because after trying to fix it for 8+ hours, I just didn't have the energy or patience to try and deal with it again.

However now I'm gonna take another stab at it.

Yes I have the SSD set as the boot drive. The first link you gave I've already looked over a few times :) I've been to pretty much every thing on the internet with even slight relevance to my problem or so it seems. I'll try some of the stuff on that second link though!

Well I updated the BIOS after I was having the problem, just to see if it would fix anything.

Anyways, I managed to fix it! I don't really know what the deal is... anyways here's a pic of what my BIOS looks like



Before when I would go into my BIOS, it would only have my 1 TB HDD there alongside my DVD drive with no option to set my SSD as the #1 priority. Like, it wasn't even listed. However if I went into the advanced BIOS, I could see the SSD there, and could set it as #1 in the boot priority there, and could also "force boot" from it, which is what I would usually do. It seems weird that it could obviously detect both drives but wouldn't list them both on the basic BIOS screen...

Anyways, I decided to do some more cable shifting despite me thinking I already had my SSD "in front" and it should therefore take whatever kind of priority there is to take. Pic related:



I guess moving my HDD to "the back" made my BIOS switch it out for my SSD on that basic BIOS screen, and it booted successfully.

The main weird thing here is that it was working just fine before with whatever configuration I had with my cables previously, and then just suddenly stopped. Now I switched it around and it works again?

Whatever; I'm just happy it works!