So, I'm currently in the middle of trying to ascertain whether my motherboard or my HDD is at fault here.
My main problem started when I took a peek in my case while it was running, didn't touch anything, but moved the case a tiny, tiny bit. The computer froze up and I had to shut it off. (I'd been having problems before that, but this is when the main issue started.)
When I booted it back up, it would recognize the drive, but it would say something like, "No proper boot drive found, please insert system disk or attach boot drive." Not verbatim, but something like that. It would just sit on that, or it would restart.
When it would do that, it would load the BIOS, and then sit while trying to figure out what HDDs I had attached to the computer. Just sit, and sit, and sit. After about two minutes it would either say there wasn't a boot drive, or it would load into XP (32-bit).
I figured it was the HDD I had (which was a Western Digital 250GB Sata 3 g/s drive, and had been failing check disks for a while, so it wasn't completely unexpected).
Because of that, I just purchased a Seagate 500GB Sata 6g/s drive, and am attempting to use it as my main system drive on a ASRock 770 Extreme3 motherboard.
I installed Windows 7 (64-bit) onto the Seagate, which goes fine until I get to the very end. Then it will load up, blue screen, and restart - or it will try to load, and then say that the Windows installation was corrupt and it can't load it (which it then gives me the option to load my previous version of Windows XP, which I installed on a different drive).
After installing Win 7, when it POSTS, after showing all the HDDs it will say "5 Master Boot Drive Failure", or something like that.
At the same time that I installed the new HDD, I also installed two more 2GB RAM sticks. And now my computer keeps freezing every minute or so, so I think that may be causing problems too.
I did check all of my cables, reset the RAM and HDDs, but no change.
So my total system looks like this:
ASRock 770 Extreme3 motherboard
XFX 5750 video card
AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE
2GB mushkin DDR3-1333 RAM
4GB a-data DDR3-1600 RAM (I'm under the impression this will run at 1333 fine while installed with a 1333, but this is possibly causing the glitching/freezing)
Seagate SATA 6 g/s 500GB
WD SATA 3 g/s 250GB
Hitachi SATA 3 g/s (I think) 1TB
Currently running Windows XP 32-bit to post this.
My main problem started when I took a peek in my case while it was running, didn't touch anything, but moved the case a tiny, tiny bit. The computer froze up and I had to shut it off. (I'd been having problems before that, but this is when the main issue started.)
When I booted it back up, it would recognize the drive, but it would say something like, "No proper boot drive found, please insert system disk or attach boot drive." Not verbatim, but something like that. It would just sit on that, or it would restart.
When it would do that, it would load the BIOS, and then sit while trying to figure out what HDDs I had attached to the computer. Just sit, and sit, and sit. After about two minutes it would either say there wasn't a boot drive, or it would load into XP (32-bit).
I figured it was the HDD I had (which was a Western Digital 250GB Sata 3 g/s drive, and had been failing check disks for a while, so it wasn't completely unexpected).
Because of that, I just purchased a Seagate 500GB Sata 6g/s drive, and am attempting to use it as my main system drive on a ASRock 770 Extreme3 motherboard.
I installed Windows 7 (64-bit) onto the Seagate, which goes fine until I get to the very end. Then it will load up, blue screen, and restart - or it will try to load, and then say that the Windows installation was corrupt and it can't load it (which it then gives me the option to load my previous version of Windows XP, which I installed on a different drive).
After installing Win 7, when it POSTS, after showing all the HDDs it will say "5 Master Boot Drive Failure", or something like that.
At the same time that I installed the new HDD, I also installed two more 2GB RAM sticks. And now my computer keeps freezing every minute or so, so I think that may be causing problems too.
I did check all of my cables, reset the RAM and HDDs, but no change.
So my total system looks like this:
ASRock 770 Extreme3 motherboard
XFX 5750 video card
AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE
2GB mushkin DDR3-1333 RAM
4GB a-data DDR3-1600 RAM (I'm under the impression this will run at 1333 fine while installed with a 1333, but this is possibly causing the glitching/freezing)
Seagate SATA 6 g/s 500GB
WD SATA 3 g/s 250GB
Hitachi SATA 3 g/s (I think) 1TB
Currently running Windows XP 32-bit to post this.