Fail to boot or restart

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I just replaced my C: drive with a Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1Tb drive – about two weeks ago. Initially, everything appeared to work fine except …….

Occasionally on bootup, I get the message “Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device.” This happens before Windows starts and may happen if I am doing my normal system startup from Hibernate or if I am doing a complete start from a shutdown. I would estimate it happens about once in every four or five starts.

This is on a desktop Acer Aspire M5620 running Win 7 that is an upgrade from Vista (the original OS). I have two hard drives, both WD. The original C: was a Hitachi and I added a WD Caviar Green 1.5 Tb, then about two weeks ago, I replaced the Hitachi with another WD but this time a Caviar Black. The replacement was done by cloning the Hitachi onto the WD then expanding the sector to fill the drive. As I said, everything appeared to go fine except for this occasional boot error.

I have searched the web and found a lot of speculation about what might cause this problem. Most cases seem to be a failed drive so I speculate that my case must be the new drive failing to spin up or an intermittent faulty boot sector on the new drive.

Can anyone confirm this and is there a way to repair the boot sector short of a reinstall of Win 7.

BTW, in every case where this has happened, a hard shutdown (press and hold the Power button) has resulted in a successful Shutdown and a subsequent press of the Power button initiates a successful Boot. The really surprising part is that the successful Boot is usually a successful Restart from Hibernate even though the system is coming from a complete hard shutdown – although the initial problem was a failure to startup from Hibernate.

Anyway, my question is, can I, and should I, attempt a boot repair or should I conclude the new drive is faulty and is failing to spin up occasionally? The latter case will make it necessary for me to return the drive and that must be done soon. I still have the original Hitachi untouched from when I did the clone so I can easily switch back. It was replaced because it ran very hot (60C) but it ran without any problems.

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Hi Chet,

Microsoft has a discussion on how to use Bootrec in the Windows Recovery Environment to fix the MBR (fixmbr) and the boot sector (fixboot) and can be found at this link .

You might also check the power and data connections from the motherboard to your new hard drive to see they are fully attached. If you find one a little loose, you might replace it with a new cable. I had a loose SATA cable in my PC a few months back and suffered similar intermittent boot failures as you describe. However when my machine would boot and get good and warm, the problem went away until the next cold boot. The cable was a very loose and sloppy fit and when I replaced it with a new one with a tighter fit, the problem went away.

If you swap out the HD with your Hitachi, and the problem goes away, then you will know if the issue lies with your new drive, and it may or may not be a problematic mbr or boot sector.

Hope this helps.

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I will try a new cable. The cable on the new WD drive is a new one and I can try the cable that had been in use in the Hitachi drive. The problem is that it is a cable that has a 90 degree connector and WD says they are inappropriate for their drives. That’s the reason I bought a new “straight in” SATA cable when I installed the new WD drive. I have no idea why WD doesn’t like the 90 degree cables but I either have to buy another “straight in” cable or try out the 90 degree one I have. At least I know the existing 90 degree cable works and I suppose it won’t hurt to try it for a few days.

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