BCD Error After Attaching DVD Burner - Why?

abrogard · 03 Feb 2019

My Asus H61-MK just gave me a refusal to boot and a BCD error this morning. Usual message saying it could be related to recent hardware changes.

Well sure enough I hung a SATA DVD burner off it last night.

So I took it off this morning after that and then she booted alright and here I am. Thank God, because my other machine has crashed this morning, too...

So if I still want to hang this DVD burner off it how should I go about it? What's the problem here? Why does attaching a device cause this sort of error? Is it some kind of problem between legacy and UEFI bios or something? Is there a way around it, a proper routine we should employ to attach such devices?

Or they just don't go on there at all?

bobkn · 03 Feb 2019

There's nothing special about attaching a SATA DVD burner.

I've never had it happen with a SATA drive, but in the IDE days, I've had a bad drive make a system fail to boot.

If you can try the drive in a different PC, that may be a worthwhile test.

abrogard · 03 Feb 2019

Thanks for that. Well my 'other machine' that I mentioned had crashed too, I removed the SATA drive that I'd put on it yesterday. And I pulled the RAM and put it back and I vacuumed all the dust. And I booted it and it's now alright. Using it now.

So perhaps it was screwed by a SATA attachment, too.

So I'll try the DVD in it. And I'll try the drive in the machine that had the DVD problem. See if they both, or either, crash.

:)

Later Edit: Well I swapped the DVD and the bad HDD and both machines are working fine now. Well both working. The H170 is very slow. But working.

So I don't know what was wrong.

Could perhaps say the H170 had dirty RAM socket or something and cleaning fixed it.

The H61? I don't know.

Later I'll swap the DVD and the HDD again and see what happens. Actually I hot swapped the DVD into the H170, by accident. Is it supposed to be alright to hot swap SATA DVD drives? Because apparently it was.