BSODs Now Boot Selection Failed Because Required Device is Inaccessibl

kinitex · 30 Jan 2012

Ok so I've been getting a BSOD what seemed like once a week for the past 6 months on my laptop, which now won't even boot into windows. The first hdd was the first to go about a year ago as it is rarely even recognized anymore, so I just moved ship to the 2nd hdd which now seems to have followed suit. Before I go out and buy a new HDD a want to confirm that it is indeed the hdd and not memory, or just corrupt drivers or something simple to fix.

What's wierd is that when I try to do the recovery disk option or even boot from the original win 7 cd to do a fresh install, I get no where because its so god awful slow now. I literally had to leave it sit to load into the repair disk option menu for a good 3 hours. I can't even start a fresh install of win 7 because of how slow everything is.

I also can't press F8 to get into the boot selection menu to select safe mode, or last known good config etc...

I updated the bios which made no difference. I opened up the laptop and disconnected and reconnected the one hdd that was easiest to get to(the other is a bitch) and nothing. I also did a scandisk on the only hdd that gets recognized and in the options it said it had a partition size of 0, but had 2 million sectors to scan which it found 0 bad sectors in.

Also when it boots up now its not even half as loud as it used to be yet all the fans seem to be spinning.

Whats your opinion on this? For sure dead HDDs or could it be something else?

Why would a couple of dead hdds prevent me from booting from a disk or usb to try a fresh install?

Here are the specs.

17"WUXGA/GT,w/MULTI DRIVE
VISTA ULTIMATE 64 bit
WINDOW 7 ULT UPGRADE COUPON
Core i7 920 (2.66 GHz) 8M
6GB DDR3 1066 (3 DIMMS)
nV GeForce Go GTX 280M w/1GB
INTEL WI-FI LINK 5300AGN
NP9280 BLUETOOTH CARD
2x 2.5" Seagate SATA 500GB (7200rpm) HDDs
RAID-OFF RAID-OFF
EXT. USB ATSC HDTV TUNER W/REMOTE
EXPRESS CARD SLOT MCE REMOTE
NP9262 SMART LI-ION BATTERY

kinitex · 30 Jan 2012

Im trying to get into the recovery disk options menu and it just hangs at a black screen with a cursor for literally 30minutes to an hour before the select a language pops up. Then I have to wait another 30 minutes for the next menue to appear.

Would I faulty hdd be capable of halting the entire computer like this?

Dave76 · 31 Jan 2012

Is that a Widow PC ghost gaming laptop?

Definitely sounds like a hardware issue.
Is it still under warranty?

Yes, a failed HDD can cause this issue.
Disconnect the HDD that failed already, see if you can boot off of the other one, or get to Repair options from the Windows 7 DVD.

If that doesn't work, take out one RAM card and try to boot or get to Repair from the DVD, if not, then take out another RAM card. Keep swapping the RAM cards until you have tried them all, one card at a time, to boot from the one HDD or to Repair from the DVD.

Get one or all of these apps and try to run from a USB memory stick, they are stand alone apps.
memtest86+ - scroll down and D/L the 'Download - Auto-installer for USB Key (Win 9x/2k/xp/7)' version.
MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Flash Drive

SeaTools for DOS - this can also be ran from a USB portable boot OS like Pendrivelinux.

These are just to test if you can get the USB bootable apps to run on your system, if they won't and you have removed the bad HDD and have one RAM card installed, then that leaves motherboard and PSU to look at.

If these apps do run then you can run memtest86+ for seven full passes, stop the test if you get any errors.
Run Seatools Long Drive Self Test.
Partition Wizard can few your HDD to check if you can see the drives from it.

Let us know the results.