I thought the relatively new system drive I installed two months had gone bad. The computer must have crashed sometime overnight and said missing boot media when powered back up. On this first boot the hard drive sounded terrible, like it could not spin up so I assumed the hard drive was having mechanical issues.
I put a different hard drive in to recover a system image created by Windows 7. It gave an error that basically said no suitable drive was found to recreate the partitions. The drive was 500GB, but the partition was much smaller and well below the 320GB hard drive I was going to restore to. The original hard drive size was small and I never increased the partition size after restoring it to the 500GB drive. I was going to try a larger hard drive, but never got the chance.
I think that the 320GB drive was probably not detected by the motherboard. Shortly after when I was going to try a 1TB drive, I could not boot to the CD-ROM drive to try to restore the image. The motherboard now will not detect the hard drive or CD-ROM drive. I tried the current system drive that I thought failed in an external enclosure. It worked fine and passed short self test. It still worries me that it sounded like it was having mechanical issues and could not spin up earlier.
I have to assume that at least the SATA controller has gone bad? Can I boot to Windows with the current system drive on the same model motherboard? It looks like it is not easy to find them on eBay. There are two listed, but both very overpriced and not sure if I want to pay a premium to make restoration easier. I suppose I could buy a SATA controller card, but maybe more than the SATA controller that went bad? It would be good to have one around, so I might go ahead any buy one anyway.
Motherboard is an ECS AM2+ Model MCP78M-A
I put a different hard drive in to recover a system image created by Windows 7. It gave an error that basically said no suitable drive was found to recreate the partitions. The drive was 500GB, but the partition was much smaller and well below the 320GB hard drive I was going to restore to. The original hard drive size was small and I never increased the partition size after restoring it to the 500GB drive. I was going to try a larger hard drive, but never got the chance.
I think that the 320GB drive was probably not detected by the motherboard. Shortly after when I was going to try a 1TB drive, I could not boot to the CD-ROM drive to try to restore the image. The motherboard now will not detect the hard drive or CD-ROM drive. I tried the current system drive that I thought failed in an external enclosure. It worked fine and passed short self test. It still worries me that it sounded like it was having mechanical issues and could not spin up earlier.
I have to assume that at least the SATA controller has gone bad? Can I boot to Windows with the current system drive on the same model motherboard? It looks like it is not easy to find them on eBay. There are two listed, but both very overpriced and not sure if I want to pay a premium to make restoration easier. I suppose I could buy a SATA controller card, but maybe more than the SATA controller that went bad? It would be good to have one around, so I might go ahead any buy one anyway.
Motherboard is an ECS AM2+ Model MCP78M-A
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