Win 7 hangs on starting windows screen

MoridinUK

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Apr 24, 2010
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Ok So I'm running this rig:

gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3 motherboard
intel q6600 slacor quad core 775 cpu, not overclocked
seasonic 600 psu
radeon hd 5770 pci express graphics card
2 optical drives
1 sata drive

Ok so after a battle to get my upgrade from xp to win7 ultimate installed all was working fine. This battle started with my trying to install on a stripe raid, via the gigabyte raid controller on the mainboard (the intel sata controller didn't support raid) one of the drives failed and had to be returned to my provider...

So I installed win 7 on the remaining drive, running as sata AHCI mode.

All installed happily.

Now a couple of days ago, I got a BSOD while running Modern Warfare 2 but could find no useful information about what had gone wrong in any logs. I ignored it expecting that if it happened again I could make more use out of the info.

The next day my replacement hard drive arrived. I installed it, formatted it, and rearranged the drive letters so it would be drive D instead of my optical drives. All seemed fine, restarted no problems. I then moved some data to it and restarted, the windows startup automatic recovery kicked in and fixed what it called drive errors (corrupt system volume) and then the system booted fine.

Next restart it didn't. It got to the starting windows screen with the logo displayed and hangs. When I turn off the power, and back on the system continually fails to post to bios, i have to disconnect the psu for a few mins and then it restarts.

If i boot from the win 7 install disk I can see the drive, (I have removed the new drive but that makes no difference) I refuse to think i may have been so unlucky to have two failed drives so close together (Western Digital Blue Caviar 500 gb drives)

So I'm thinking of trying to start the system with AHCI turned off running the hard drives as IDE. I've also noticed that there are two options in my bios for sata, one runs sata port 0-3 as NATIVE IDE mode the other a LEGACY IDE mode, does anyone know what the differences may be?

I suspect that all my woes are caused by a faulty, even if only slightly, AHCI controller on the main board. It is an Intel iStr V1.07...

The system does infact boot if i run the drives in ide mode... he event view logs show that the system reported that the hard drive had a bad block but this was from attempts to boot while in sata mode, since ide mode I cleared the log and no further disk errors appear

so the ultimate solution must be to replace the mainboard?

Does anyone know of a good 775 board? I was thinking about an ASUS P5Q PRO Turbo?