Home-built desktop won't recognize optical drive

[phillipmeade]

I have a home-bulit PC running Windows 7. After moving and the desktop not being started for several months, I started the machine, everything was fine, AVG updated and asked to restart. The computer won't restart, I've tried everything, save mode, restore points, removing AVG completely - windows won't launch. No problem, I've backed up everything, I'm ready to do a clean reinstall of windows 7. But my optical drive doesn't work and hasn't for sometime. I bought a new optical drive, and it doesn't show up in the bios. Thus without an optical drive I can't reinstall windows.

Any thoughts?

Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH

 

[XxDarkMarioxX]

Try plugging it into another sata port and see if it works!

 

[SkyNetRising]

Any thoughts?

Install from USB flash drive.

 

[phillipmeade]

Try plugging it into another sata port and see if it works!

Great suggestion! Now I'm totally confused.

I have 5 internal hard drives. So I unplugged the last one (which in theory had nothing of importance on it), and plugged that SATA cable into the optical drive. On startup, I noticed something a little different, so I decided to try to start windows normally. Windows finally booted up with everything exactly the way it was! Which is really what I wanted. So I'm left to believe that there's some problem with the 5th hard drive that was preventing windows from starting.

Now I'll try different configurations to see if I can get the last hard drive and the optical drive all working. What could have caused this weird malfunction?

 

[mdd1963]

you might want to sort out which drive is which, which one contains your OS, etc., and match that with "Boot device priority" in your BIOS settings...