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SATA cable and Windows installation simultaneously broken, then magically fixed by Ubuntu?

I'm fixing a computer for a friend. She said it just stopped working one day.
At first the hard drive didn't show up at all in the BIOS screen, so I reset the BIOS and checked the RAM ports. The RAM is recognized. Also, the motherboard gives the warning beeps when the RAM is missing so it must not be totally dead.

I switched out the SATA cable on the hard drive and it did show up all of a sudden. However, it wouldn't boot Windows, even after Windows tried to repair the installation several times. I put the original SATA cable back in because I needed to use the other one, and the hard drive showed up in BIOS this time, with the original cable. So I'm not sure the SATA cable is problematic after all, or if it's the HDD or the Windows install. I tried running a memory diagnostic and everything checked out but Windows still wouldn't load.

I decided to install Ubuntu via a flash drive and see if that would work. Ubuntu wouldn't recognize the HDD even though the BIOS screen did. I switched SATA ports and the SATA cable, and all of a sudden Ubuntu recognizes the HDD. Ubuntu has installed correctly now.

But get this ... now Windows works if I choose it as the OS on startup ... what?

So, it seems like there was a problem with the Windows install, but it also seems like there might be a problem with the SATA cable or the HDD ... I'm not sure where the root cause is, or if there are multiple issues here. I had tried the HDD in another computer but it didn't show up; I was using the original SATA cable, which might have been the problem.

But now everything is working after I installed Ubuntu, so yay? Should I be worried about the HDD or the power supply? Sorry for the long confusing post.

OS: Windows 7 (and now Ubuntu also)
RAM: 4GB RAM (dual ports)
Processor: Core i3 processor @ 2.93 GHZ with 4 CPU's
HDD: ST325031
Graphics Card: GeForce 8400 GS



Submitted March 30, 2018 at 04:55PM by Richard_J https://ift.tt/2Iipi77
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