Added 2nd HDD, Now Programs Won't Open & Hanging at Logging Off

maxseven said:

Along this line, what is the capacity of your Power Supply? Maybe it can't handle the extra load, or you might try a different plug location (from the PSU).

That's a great point. When you pulled the new hard drive, did you disconnect its power cable as well?

paul1149 said:

The next thing I would try is to pull the optical drives. Windows is having a problem accessing them, and perhaps one of them is causing the hangs. Worth a try.

If that doesn't change anything, you could try reverting to a restore point, or Last known good configuration.

As a MB control, you could run a linux live distro off a dvd or usb stick and see how it performs. I recommend linux lite.

maxseven said:

paul1149 said:

The next thing I would try is to pull the optical drives.

Along this line, what is the capacity of your Power Supply? Maybe it can't handle the extra load, or you might try a different plug location (from the PSU).

Your BIOS might also have a System Info display showing the various voltages.

Removed my optical drive and disabled the virtual BD rom drive and bang it worked. Thanks so much for the help everyone. Now I was trying to think what could be causing that all of the sudden as I built this back in the beginning of the summer 2013 and it hasn't given me a problem yet. It's a 750W PSU so it definitely shouldn't be an issue as I'm running a GTX 660 and not SLI GTX 980 TI or anything like the cool kids. I could give a look to see if anything was suddenly overdrawing power if that's even possible.

paul1149 said:

maxseven said:

Along this line, what is the capacity of your Power Supply? Maybe it can't handle the extra load, or you might try a different plug location (from the PSU).

That's a great point. When you pulled the new hard drive, did you disconnect its power cable as well?

I did right after I just tried pulling the sata cable at first thinking that could be a problem but it didn't help. When I pulled the optical drive I left the power plug in and it started working so I definitely think it had something to do with the sata connection between the optical drive and motherboard.

Very cool. I suppose the next thing is to try a different optical drive.