Computer stopped working; very perplexed

[d1rtydeedz]

Four days ago I was playing a game when my computer went to the blue screen of death and crashed. Upon attempting a restart I was given an error after the bios screen of a missing OS. I restarted to BIOS and found my OS drive was missing from the BIOS settings. I run my OS on a separate SSD [Kingston sv300 120gb]. I have two other 1 TB harddrives for everything else.

I restarted again and found the boot drive had been changed to another drive. I checked boot drive settings again and found my OS drive listed but not selected. I re-selected it as boot drive and restarted. A black screen popped up stating the OS drive was not available yada yada. I repeated the above to find the same and re-selected my OS drive which keeps mysteriously disappearing and reappearing. Each time a restart after selecting my OS drive does the same, a crash to black screen with the same generic message of OS not available or something similar.

I figured my SSD was on the way out so I installed a fresh Hybrid drive and re-installed Windows. I was able to get started to Windows but all of my drivers were of course gone. I began the process of reinstalling drivers but kept crashing to another black screen which asked to Generate ATA driver diskette. I went back to bios and switched to IDE and restarted. Now I'm back to a third black screen after BIOS which states OS is missing.

I restart to BIOS and find this new drive is missing. I restart to BIOS again and it appears. I select it and continue and get the previous black screen of no OS. I go back to BIOS and find the boot drive continues to switch to another drive or is missing altogether.

I've done some searching on the issue and find a few people posting similar problems. Are we facing a new threat? Is this some sort of cyber attack [virus, etc]?

I've reached a wall and have no idea where to go from here besides taking my tower to a professional. What do you guys think?

d1rty

 

[SchizTech]

In all you've tried, have you switched to different SATA ports? Also, is that an 'original' P67 or a board with a fixed chipset? The original 6-series chipset had a SATA controller issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall

If you still have the original SSD, is there another system you can use to test it?

 

[d1rtydeedz]

In all you've tried, have you switched to different SATA ports? Also, is that an 'original' P67 or a board with a fixed chipset? The original 6-series chipset had a SATA controller issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall

If you still have the original SSD, is there another system you can use to test it?

I have tried different SATA ports to the same result. And yes, it is an 'original P6'; I had no idea about the chipset issue until you said something.

I do have a laptop I could test the SSD with but I don't have an adapter for the SATA to USB port. Perhaps if I open my laptop up there will be a sata port I could plug it in to?

d1rty

 

[SchizTech]

Unless it's a really old laptop it has a SATA HDD, so as long as that SSD is a 2.5" drive it will fit in that slot. In changing SATA ports did you try SATA3 ports or just the SATA2 ports? Only SATA2 ports are affected by that bug.

If you find the SSD works it's not necessarily that 6-series chipset bug but it may point to a motherboard problem either way. Let me also suggest clearing the BIOS settings entirely by removing the battery (a small round battery on the board, make sure the PC is unplugged also when you pull it so that there's no power to the BIOS chip for a minute or two than restart).