BIOS Not Always Recognizing Hard Drive

[eyedeaco]

Hi guys!
My girlfriend has a PC which I bought her a couple of years ago, it's a relatively basic (but more than adequate) system. It's used perhaps once or twice a month, usually for simple tasks such as photos, internet browsing etc.

A couple of weeks ago, with Windows 8.1 installed, she tried to turn the PC on (with no changes made from a perfectly working PC) to be asked to 'Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device.'

Now, Googling told me to go into BIOS and ensure that it was still booting from the C: drive, but it was no longer there. Long story short, I concluded that the drive had died and therefore upgraded the 500GB SATA that was in there to a new Kingston SSD drive and I also upgraded to Windows 10.

At first, the Kingston SSD drive worked flawlessly, however I then get another phone call, the error is back again. I head round to fix it, and you guessed it, the drive isn't showing in BIOS.

After a few reboots, trying every setting I could in BIOS it works again, and it shows up again aswell, all is fine.

Next day, same problem, but this time it wants to work even less. I try swapping the SATA ports, the SATA and power cable, just about everything I can think of and eventually it shows up. I told her to leave the computer on in the hope that the error doesn't come back, but sure enough in the middle of the night last night she woke up to the dreaded black screen once again.

I understand that this is an intermittent fault, but it really couldn't have come at a worse time financially for needing a repair. Not only does it look like we've lost all the data on the previous hard drive, (which stupidly wasn't backed up) but now the PC won't work at all. Gah!

Any help is HUGELY appreciated, thank you all so much in advance.

 

[Maurizio Troso]

Try another sata port on motherboard, change sata and electric cables, there might be a faulty port / cable.
Check connection inside case if they are firmly set

 

[eyedeaco]

Thanks for your reply.

This was my initial suspicion too. I have replaced the SATA cable with 3 different ones, and tried 4 different ports on the motherboard.

I have used different power leads within the case, most recently being the one which is making the CD-ROM drive work fine.

I have now brought the PC to my place so that I can hopefully work through it. At the moment the hard drive isn't showing up in BIOS at all, and the computer is basically denying it's existence.

I tried inserting the old 500GB to see what the reaction would be from that, and where the SSD literally takes me STRAIGHT into BIOS when I turn it on, the old SATA has a while of trying to boot up, before it then tells me that it has a disk read error. This was using the same cables, so the power one must be working at least.

I tried booting using my USB with Windows 10 installed on it, it gave me options for startup repair so I tried that and I was told:
The boot configuration data file doesn't contain valid information for an operating system.

File: \BOOT\BDC
Error code: 0xc0000098

I'm assuming this is soley because it's not seeing the SSD?