Windows 7 not booting after failed SRT (SSD caching) install

This is a fairly new computer, only about a month old. i7 2700k, z68 motherboard, with a 1.5tb WD black HD, and a 128gb crucial M4 ssd.

I followed the instructions for setting up ssd caching, the SATA controller was set to RAID, I installed the intel software and enabled acceleration and it said everything went fine.

But when I went to reboot, I received the lovely "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" error message.

I checked the bios, and it was booting from the correct HD (I tried the only other option anyway just in case, it was the ~50 odd gb of unformatted space left on the SSD)

AFter that I entered the raid until (ctrl-i at boot) and removed the acceleration and deleted the raid array (because it was being used as a cache this was non destructive)

Still no boot. So I reinstalled win7 directly on the SSD, booted, and checked the HDD to make sure it hadn't been wiped. It hadn't, all the files were still there, including all the windows stuff.

I backed up my data to an external drive just in case, but I'd really like to get this install booting again.

I trawled the webs a bit, and have tried entering recovery mode and using the bootrec.exe and bootsect.exe to fix it, but to be honest I'm not sure what I'm doing with those.

My question is basically: How do I make my harddrive bootable again?

Solution 1:

I have successfully fixed the HDD so it is bootable, and subsequently reactivated SRT without the issue repeating itself. I will post some useful links incase anyone else stumbles upon this post with the same issue.

I'll leave the question unanswered, so if someone who actually knows what happens comes along they can get credit.

The only difference I can think of between it working and not, is how long I waited after activating acceleration before restarting the computer. The first time I restarted immediately, the second time the computer was on for about 4 hours before I restarted.

Links:

• A review from anandtech
• The step by step guide I followed
• Optimisation stuff I never got round to actually using
• The actual user guide for SRT from Intel
• Guide from hardware secrets
• Tom's hardware forum post about SRT issues
• Intel thread which looks like it may be the same issue I was having. Solved by updating. (mine didn't need to update, it just worked the second time)
• Guide to restoring the MBR using bootsect
• Guide to fixing booting issues using bootrec
• Forum thread on how to set the partition to active. Has useful diskpart info

Here are the steps I took (as well as I can remember them) that seemed to make the disk bootable.

Before you do all this you might want to set your boot order to HDD -> CD so that every time you restart it first checks to see if the HDD is bootable, if not then it will take you back to the install CD and you can go into the recovery section and get your command prompt.

1. Unplug the SSD. Probably not needed, but because I'd installed a second copy of win7 on the ssd to let me back up data I was worried the windows repair tool might target the wrong install.
2. Go nuts with bootrec (I did all 4 possible options)
3. Go nuts with bootsect (check the settings, I think I used something like bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr)
4. Try to run windows autorepair about 4 times with no success. (To do this, chuck in the CD and boot from it, select your language, then down in the bottom left corner should be a repair option. It's the same as the way you get the console to do bootrec/bootsec)
5. Set the partition to active as detailed in the last link. (Copied here incase the forum dies, commands separated by semicolons: Diskpart; list disk; select disk 0; list partition; select partition 1; active; exit; exit (Make sure you replace 0 and 1 with the disk/partition your windows install is on)
6. Try automatic repair again. I think it had a cry the first time and wanted to contact microsoft. Just reboot and do it again. I think I ran it maybe 3 times before the harddrive would boot.

Hopefully this helps someone. If you're reading this and you understand what the actual issue is I'd love it if you could post an answer explaining why activating SRT would cause the accelerated HDD to forget how to boot.

Solution 2:

This happened to a friend of mine at a LAN. All other settings were OK, but for some reason the BIOS had set the HDD mode back to IDE. I changed it back to RAID and it now works fine.