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Nick_D

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PC Reboots and cannot find drive

Hi

I have a pc which keeps rebooting complaining that it cannot see the system hard drive.  A hard reset bring the pc back up and then it goes down again after 30 minutes or so complaining that there is no system disk.

I have changed the hard drive thinking that this was the issue but the problem still persists.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks
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John
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Nick_D

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Hi

I never changed the OS, I mirrored the drive onto a new one.
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>>  I never changed the OS, I mirrored the drive onto a new one.

Hmm.  There exists the possibility that the OS is at fault rather than the drive if you did that.  I'd try a reinstall of the OS on this drive (try Linux if necessary) and see what that does.
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Thanks for the advice, will give that a go and let you know what happens?
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I do think heat could be the issue as it runs fine for around 30-45 mins and then pops.  So an expanding component which then fails makes sense.

Does anyone think it could possibly be the drive controller failing?
You could try booting with a bootable CD (Ultimate Boot CD) and see how long it runs. I had an old XP machine with symptoms like yours. Booting with a CD (and subsequent fail) condemned the motherboard.

..... Thinkpads_User
Get a fan blowing down on the southbridge heatsink on the motherboard.  That is usually the drive controller.

The southbridge gets very hot and if not getting enough cooling then ...
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install ubunto (free) on that disk, ansd check if it stays up running -  that will show if the problem is hardware or not   www.ubuntu.com
you can also monitor the temps with speedfan   http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
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Tried all of the above with no luck. Will try one last thing and put in a PCI sata card to see if that has any joy. However, it looks like you were all right and the mobo has gone to pc heaven!
@Nick_D - Thanks for the update and I was happy to help.

.... Thinkpads_User
I was happy to be of assistance, too bad we were not able to fully resolve the issue.