Sata drives only recognized for short time after power on

[shepard91]

I apologize in advance for the mistakes I'll make, being not english. Recently, while I was playing a game, windows crashed into a BSOD and rebooted, giving me the "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" error. If I reboot the pc after this error and go to the bios, I see NONE of the sata drives (which are three hard drives and two dvd drives), even if I hear them spin (I could be wrong but when I touch one of the hard drives it gives a slight vibration). The bios does, however, recognize everything else, like my external usb hard drive, the RAM and so on. I tried to reseat the cables, both on the drives and on the mobo, but no luck. Then I discovered that, occasionally, when I leave the pc shut down for a while and then power it on again it will recognize all of my sata drives. In these cases, if I go to the bios I can see all of them properly recognized. This, however, only lasts a few moment, since when I exit the bios the computer will freeze into a black screen. A very few times I was also able to go into windows 8 recovery menu, but even in that case, nothing will have any sort of effect. Just for the saying, I swapped the sata cables and probably changed the order they were connected. I don't really know what to think, but probably the sata ports are where the problem is (or maybe the psu?)...what do you think the problem is?

 

[GhislainG]

Unfortunately you had serious problems, but you failed to get the system fixed before having even more issues.

I may be wrong, but you probably installed Windows 8 with both hard disks connected and the Windows XP disk has to be connected in order to load Windows 8. If Windows XP crashes with error 0x0000007B, then it most likely is missing drivers to load from USB.

 

[cin19]

The problem is the boot files between win8 and winXP because they are not compatible. You need to rebuild the BCD, check here for more detail. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 If you still have problem, you can try to reinstall the OS again. Here is how to dual boot win8 and winxp. http://techingiteasy.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/how-to-dual-boot-windows-xp-and-windows-8/ I try dual boot win7/winxp or win7/win8, but don't have an extra copy of win8 try the win7/win8 yet.

 

[shepard91]

Unfortunately you had serious problems, but you failed to get the system fixed before having even more issues.

I may be wrong, but you probably installed Windows 8 with both hard disks connected and the Windows XP disk has to be connected in order to load Windows 8. If Windows XP crashes with error 0x0000007B, then it most likely is missing drivers to load from USB.

I do not know..I let the shop owner do the dual boot, but I don't think it's related since both the os's are installed on one hard drive and the other one is only used as a data storage device. The XP error thing seems more plausible, except I couldn't get any error message. Anyhow, I only need to know CPU and RAM, right? Then I won't need to boot and run any software because I pulled the ram out of the slot and this is what it says on it:
DDR2 800(5) 2GX16 U-DIMM
Is this enough?

 

[shepard91]

The problem is the boot files between win8 and winXP because they are not compatible. You need to rebuild the BCD, check here for more detail. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 If you still have problem, you can try to reinstall the OS again. Here is how to dual boot win8 and winxp. http://techingiteasy.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/how-to-dual-boot-windows-xp-and-windows-8/ I try dual boot win7/winxp or win7/win8, but don't have an extra copy of win8 try the win7/win8 yet.

Thanks for the links they'll come in handy. I didn't even know about that bootloader fix. I only wanted to know what ram I have though, and I was able to do that without any boot, so I won't need those right now. I hope.

 

[GhislainG]

Letting the shop owner fix it for you may be your best option.