Can't boot Windows 8.1 (looks like hard drive problems)

[Gaius_Catulus]

Hi all,

So I was watching Netflix tonight on my pc I built in September, and when I tried to leave fullscreen mode the screen became completely white. No keyboard commands would do anything, and leaving it for an hour did not change anything, so I did a hard reset of the pc.

Unfortunately, when I started it up again, I got an error telling me "a required device isn't connected." So great. I dug out my Windows 8.1 installation disk and try the repair utility. I get a message saying the hard drive is locked. I went online and found some suggestions to run some bootrec commands and try again, but that didn't work.

So at this point I'm like "screw it, I'll just reformat the drive and reinstall windows." However, when I went to do this my drive showed up as 0.0MB, thus preventing me from installing windows. So I go look at my BIOS, which sure enough claims my drive is 0.0GB in size. I took a look at it from the command prompt in the repair utility using DISKPART, and that claimed the drive was 32KB.

Any suggestions on what I can do here? At this point the only thing I have left that I know how to do is go get another drive (which I'd really rather not).

Thanks!

 

[Mysticking32]

That's strange. Let's try a few things, before I recommend replacing it.

First, unplug both your sata cable and power cable to your hard drive. Ensure all the wires leading to your hard drive are securely connected to the motherboard and psu.

Second, make sure there's no dust or any particle build up in the wires or on the drive itself.

Once you do that, plug everything back in and reboot the computer. See if that fixes it.

 

[Gaius_Catulus]

No go there. I also tried switching out the SATA cable with one that I know works fine. Still shows up in BIOS with size 0.0GB, still get the boot error, still get the "drive is locked" thing from the Windows refresh option.

 

[Kyle_L]

The drive is definetely on it's way out. Try booting Windows Setup from a USB with CrystalDiskInfo on it, and run it. It will tell you what is failing. But before kicking it out for good, try running the "clean" command in diskpart.