Hard freezes and won't recognize boot drive.

[RogueRequest]

For a long while now I have been having the problem of my computer hard freezing. It doesn't matter if it's doing light stuff like browsing or hard stuff like gaming, it will just freeze up for anywhere near 10 seconds to several minutes. This is especially frustrating when I can continue to see my hard drive and RAM monitors show that they are under low or normal usage.

Often times when I shut down my computer it will not recognize the boot drive when it comes up. I have gotten I/O errors, hard drive not found errors, OS not present errors, and many more. Sometimes it will act like it wasn't shut off properly and ask me if I want to start normally or in safe mode.

I thought maybe it was a software problem so I started with a fresh install of the OS. I made sure the BIOS was up to date. I made sure that all drivers were up to date and all the windows updates were installed. I noticed that my RAM was not running at it's normal speed, so I changed that to. It was running at 1666mhz when it should have been running at 1866mhz, so I switched that in the BIOS.

I am really not the most tech savvy person in the world, but I know enough to see if maybe I can get some help from you guys. I would love to see if there is something that can be done before I just start to randomly replace parts until my computer is working the way it's supposed to have run and never has.

My setup is below.
AMD FX-8350
Thermaltake Frio Heatsink
Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition
ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0
16GBs of Corsair Vengeance LP 1866 RAM
PNY XLR8 120gb SSD
WD Caviar Black 500gb HDD
Rosewill 80Plus Bronze Certified Modular 1000w PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate Edition

 

[thx1138v2]

I'm assuming the OS is installed on the SSD. If that's not the case ignore this post.

SSDs can become internally corrupted when they encounter an unexpected power loss. That doesn't mean the power to the whole computer goes down but tha the computer shuts down without going through the normal shutdown process. It sounds like that has happened one way or another on your machine. See the following link.
The mysteriously disappearing drive

You can try this to confirm it or prove it erroneous: remove the SSD and reload the OS on the hard drive.

 

[RogueRequest]

I'm assuming the OS is installed on the SSD. If that's not the case ignore this post.

SSDs can become internally corrupted when they encounter an unexpected power loss. That doesn't mean the power to the whole computer goes down but tha the computer shuts down without going through the normal shutdown process. It sounds like that has happened one way or another on your machine. See the following link.
The mysteriously disappearing drive

You can try this to confirm it or prove it erroneous: remove the SSD and reload the OS on the hard drive.

If I were to buy a new SSD, which I've been thinking about doing anyway, and clone my current drive over would any of the problems transfer over to the new SSD in the form of files that have been damaged or corrupted by the SSD. Or would it just be best to use a fresh install of Windows on another drive to test the theory?

 

[thx1138v2]

I'm not sure what would happen since the control mechanisms in the SSD are so different than an HDD. If it's just corrupted files the cloning software will just copy the corrupted file. If its a structural problem caused by a power outage to the SSD it might not clone at all.

I personally would install to the HDD you already have to test it. There are other things that could be causing your problem like mobo/ram/PSU but it sounded like an SSD problem to me. If it turns out that it is a corrupted SSD and you still want an SSD then do a new install to a new SSD and uninstall from the HDD.

When SSDs first came out there were a lot of posts here about corrupted SSDs. I've been holding off from buying one for my work machine until the bugs get worked out.

 

[RogueRequest]

I ended up picking up a new SSD. Using Acronis True Image I attempted to clone my old SSD over to my new SSD. I ended up getting an error saying that bootmgr was missing. I cloned it again and the error was still there. After fiddling with a bunch of stuff and getting nowhere very slowly I decided to do a full Windows install on the new SSD. It worked like a charm and the new SSD is suffering none of the problems that the other SSD was suffering from. Thanks for helping me narrow the problem down, I really didn't want to have to replace something even more expensive just to get my computer up and running again.