Can't boot from hard drive, otherwise fine

Question

TL;DR: Stopped being able to boot from a drive, but it appears to work otherwise, what should I do with it?

I've had a couple of Crucial SSDs since late 2011. No real issues, aside from one of them not appearing on a cold boot every once in awhile.

Yesterday, Windows just wouldn't start. It went into an Automatic Repair loop, unable to make any repairs, but also unable to tell me what was wrong. I created an install USB, and used that to attempt manual repairs. Everything I tried led me to believe there might be something wrong with the SATA controller: I could read from the drives, but booting wouldn't work. Any changes I tried to make would end with "I/O device error", "hard drive locked", "device inaccessible", or one of several others.

Finally, I got the bright idea of swapping hard drives and reinstalling Windows on the other drive that I was just using for Steam.

Voila, that worked, and the "broken" drive is even showing up and I can read and write to it.

My question is, should I replace this other drive? It appears to be working fine at this point. I can't explain why I can't boot from it, but as a data drive, will it suffice?

Answer 1

First I would use one of the SMART tools to look at the drive self diagnostic errors and see if there are any indications of the drive going bad. This stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and can give you some insight into. Possiblenhardware failures.

Another specific tool worth mentioning is SpinRite which scrubs the whole drive and is explained in detail at its website.

These don't address an OS-level issue, but then you have already done the reinstall.

Answer 2

The problem with the drive may be due to corruption of the partition and/or files involved in booting. I wouldn't replace the drive without first doing the following:

1. Since you can access the drive from another Windows installation, first copy off any data you want to save.

2. Next, run diagnostics on the hard drive (search the Internet for your drive's manufacturer and/or model number plus the term diagnostics). If it fails, then you have your answer. If not...

3. Reinstall Windows on the drive, but during the installation choose Advanced for the install type and when looking at the disk configuration on your computer delete all partitions on the drive (it's best not to have any other hard drives connected during this step).

As long as the drive passes diagnostics, there's no reason not to try using it as a boot drive again.