Windows Loading screen hang - Caused by secondary HDD

[FilipeFerreira]

Hi guys, I just built this computer a couple of months ago, yesterday I turned on my computer in the morning, and it ran fine, did my usual morning website raid on soccer etc, turned it off went out to do some errands, came back and turned it on and it kept hanging on the "Windows Loading" screen, read around about a couple of things it could be, i think I narrowed it down to my secondard hard drive (WD 500G Caviar Blue) which i use for storage and downloads, all my games and OS are installed on my solid state.

So whenever my secondary hard drive is plugged in, my comp hangs on "Windows Loading". If i unplug it, it loads up windows quick and easy like always. I turned on hot swap, and if i plugged in my HDD after my computer was already loading into windows, it would be fine than once it recognized it, it would start crashing my windows explorer etc constantly. I tried switching SATA ports, now it goes into windows with the hard drive plugged into another SATA port, the HDD is recoginzed in Disk Management, and is also recognized in device manager, but I cant access it.

It's extremely frustrating, and I need to get to some files on that secondary HDD, any help would be greatly appreciated.

These are my specs.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-V LK
OCZ-VERTEX4 128GIG SSD
WDC WD5000AAKX-004EA0 500GIG HDD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
4x4Gig G Skill Rip Jaws 2133
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit 7600 Multiprocessor Free

 

[essenbe]

It sounds like you may be the victim of a failed hard drive. First I would go to disk management ( right click computer, select manage, and in the left column select disk management) Right click on the drive in question and select 'change drive letter and path', select add, then select the drive letter you want to assign to it. If Windows whants to initialize or format the drive, do not do it. You will lose all the data on it. If it just adds the drive letter, you are OK. If that does not work, go to Western Digital and download their diagnostic program, Data Guard.
(WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Black) run that and see if it finds the drive and only run the diagnostic tests.

 

[FilipeFerreira]

It sounds like you may be the victim of a failed hard drive. First I would go to disk management ( right click computer, select manage, and in the left column select disk management) Right click on the drive in question and select 'change drive letter and path', select add, then select the drive letter you want to assign to it. If Windows whants to initialize or format the drive, do not do it. You will lose all the data on it. If it just adds the drive letter, you are OK. If that does not work, go to Western Digital and download their diagnostic program, Data Guard.
(WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Black) run that and see if it finds the drive and only run the diagnostic tests.

I tried to "change drive letter and path" in disk management before, and it gave me the "Disk Management Console view is not up-to-date" error. So i took out my HDD and connected it using a USB adapter I have, when the HDD loads up, it gives me an option to just view the files, or to scan and fix now, guess it might have problems?

I doubt it's a failed hard disk, i just bought it less than 3 months ago, and I have it connected now via a usb adapter, and I am currently copying all files off of it onto an external. I also downloaded Western Digital Data guard, and scanned it using the quick scan, and it said it had no problems.

Since im currently copying everything off it, im gonna to try to format it and put it back in and see if it fixes the problem.....

 

[FilipeFerreira]

So i solved it, but no in the way i wanted.

I managed to connect it via a USB adapter, backed up all my data, and than proceeded to format it using disc management, than i turned off my computer, unplugged it via usb, and connected back using sata, and turned on my computer, got into windows quickly like before, and magically, it appears, ready to use.

 

[essenbe]

Congratulations, well done.