Almost 2 years ago I built a custom desktop. This week it seems to be becoming inoperable. It's a dual boot system capable of booting to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. When I sat down at it the other night, I noticed Windows (8.1) complaining about broken links in my shortcuts. I soon discovered my F: drive (the main data drive) did not appear in "This PC." I thought maybe the drive failed, but I had some pending updates, so I rebooted. Rebooting took abnormally longer to happen. Programs that I personally set to launch at startup in the system tray never launched. I opened a File Explorer windows to view This PC and all the drives appeared, but the green progress bar indicating the loading of all the drives' info took many minutes to finish. The F: drive did appear, but the blue bar indicating how full it was never did. Interacting with the window put it into a (Not Responding) state. I wasn't able to open any files. Wondering if this was related to recent software changes, I powered down and booted into my Windows 7 drive instead. It got to the screen that allows me to select Windows 7 or 8, but once I selected 7, the screens went black and stayed that way. I was forced to do a hard shutdown. I tried Windows 8 one more time but had the same problems. So I shut it down and left it shutdown since.
If my F: drive were the problem, I wouldn't think the OSes (each are on their own separate drives) would have such trouble. My question is, what parts should I suspect of failing? How can I diagnose this? My best guess is that a drive bus on the MoBo could be bad, causing some of the drives to have trouble communicating. I've never had such catastrophic failure before other than what was obviously HDD related. Could a bad RAM stick cause this? Could the CPU be failing?
I can get specific part model identifiers if needed. I have a Gigabyte motherboard, an Intel i7 (one of the Haswell models) and four hard drives. There are 32 GB of that "Hyper Red" memory that Kingston makes. Each OS is on its own SSD drive made by Samsung in the neighborhood of 320 GB. The other two drives (F: and G:) are 3 TB SATA disks. One is my primary data drive and the other is its backup (I also use other backup methods). There are 32 GB of that "Hyper Red" memory that Kingston makes. I have a pretty decent NVIDIA graphics card made by PCN I believe. Corsair powersupply. Blu-Ray burner.