[SOLVED] Mothers PC occasionally fails to find HDD to boot, Unplugging and re-plugging drive fixes.

[srsalt]

Hey Everyone not sure if this is the correct part of the forum to post. I'll give some background info the problem is as stated in the title.
Years ago I built a my first PC in a refurbished HP case and upgraded my moms computer using my old parts, its a bit of a hodge podge job but it works. She says she was having problems before upgrading to w10 but the problems seem more frequent, I have only just learned about the problem in the last month or so. I guess in the past she could just wait and eventually it would recognize on boot, I had it happen a few weeks ago and fixed it by unplugging and re-plugging. I don't know much about HDDs, or motherboards and am a little lost on what could be causing this. Thanks in advance!

 

[dorsai]

My first suggestion on old PC's acting up is to change out the BIOS backup battery...typically a coin style CR2032 battery located near the expansion slots on the motherboard. If it goes bad it forces the motherboard to rebuild it's internal tables for plugged in hardware on every start-up vs storing the data. You can usually find them on the camera battery rack at any corner drugstore.

 

[scout_03]

when system boot does it show currrent date and time .

 

[King_V]

Something like this happened to my dad's computer, but he didn't have to disconnect. Trying to reboot would succeed.

Then he'd have to try to reboot twice. Eventually 3 times, and eventually it would take anywhere from 2 to 15 attempts to get it to boot.

What we had to do was get a new HDD. My brother, on his PC, was able to install my dad's old hard drive, and the newly purchased hard drive, as secondary drives on his PC. Since my brother's PC was booting the OS from HIS drive rather than my dad's old drive, he was easily able boot up, and use a cloning tool to clone my dad's old drive to the new one.


I am NOT sure if this is the same situation that's affecting you, but it sounds somewhat similar.