Could use a little troubleshooting help on an Optiplex 990

[torin3]

My work bought a refurbished Optiplex 990 (yes it is beyond warranty now), and we've been having problems with it. Win 7 Pro 64bit, i5-2400, 8GB RAM, 2TB drive.

First it would occasionally not see the hard drive when trying to boot. I replaced the SATA cable just in case that was the problem, and made a backup image of the drive.

It still would fail to see the drive occasionally, so the next step was to update all the drivers and flash the BIOS to the most current version (19).

A couple of weeks after that, it just stopped seeing the drive. Wouldn't show up in the BIOS at all.

So, I grabbed a replacement drive and restored the backup image on it. BIOS saw that drive, but said it wasn't bootable. So, I took a Dell Win 7 Pro 64bit install disk and tried a fresh install. It worked ok until it got to where it reboots and loads from the HD. It said it hit an error and needed to reboot to finish setup. Lather/rinse/repeat. So I took an OEM Win 7 Pro 64bit install disk and tried that. Same error, same loop.

So, I'm now running memtest86 V4.3.7 and it has been going for 4 1/2 hours with no error.

At this point, I'm not sure what else to test. I'm thinking it may be the motherboard, or chip that is the problem at this point.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[Joe88]

did you try switching the hdd and odd sata ports?
edit: seems to be 4 ports on that board so just try moving the hdd to a different one?

 

[torin3]

did you try switching the hdd and odd sata ports?
edit: seems to be 4 ports on that board so just try moving the hdd to a different one?

I did early on in the process, and the HDD would only boot in the original port. I haven't tried it since the BIOS/UEFI flash though.

 

[knoober]

What about Diskpart? CMD > Diskpart>list disk>select disk X> clean/clean all

clean is quick, but clean all will take all night on a 2T so maybe set it to clean on another machine while you shoot other troubles

 

[Bluefalcon13]

One of two things, and I have seen them both on opti's.

A) the HDD was failing, and finally gave up the ghost.
B) the mobo SATA controller is dead.

Try using another known good opti 990's HDD, and take the current suspect HDD and put it in the known good one (assuming you have a few of em around the office). That is where I would start.