New
#1
Unusual HDD fault
Never seen an HDD fail in this way before.
My System One below has been working well for years, but on a Restart it failed to boot. Simple, I thought, I'll just boot from my Macrium rescue USB and restore a recent image. However, while I could bring up the boot device menu using F12 and select the USB it wouldn't boot from that either. However long I waited it would just sit on a black screen.
The only way to get the PC to boot from anything, USB, CD/DVD or HDD was to remove the original HDD. Controller failure? Not on the motherboard at least, I replace the HDD with one containing an installed Windows 10 and that booted correctly. The machine could also boot from USB while any HDD (apart from the original one) was present.
OK, so it must be the internal controller of the HDD that was at fault. But here comes the really strange bit - put it in an external USB housing and it is fully functional (read and write) and Chkdsk says it's healthy, BUT....
....if this disk is left connected, even in the USB enclosure, no PC it is connected to can boot from anything, its own HDD or a USB.
I'm not looking for help to fix this HDD. As I said, the drive is fully read/write functional and currently being cloned to a spare known good HDD.
What I'm asking is whether any of the HDD Gurus have come across a fault as strange as this - and if so, can they explain what exactly has failed?