Sorry in advance for any spelling errors writing this much on my phone gives me bad hand cramp. I bought a skyfire 3 with windows 8.1 and two hard drives earlier this year and yesterday after restarting it came up with a black screen saying "checking media presence, no media present before going to the bios, after a number of restarts I found no way to make it start properly and booted using my windows 8.1 usb to try and see if repaing the OS would help but all the repair tools either said that the windows drive was locked or ran and did nothing. After looking online I found that the best solution would be to disconnect the second hard drive to see if that fixes the problem, however would this void the warranty if I open the case? I am also worried that it wont work as I am concerned that my main SSD might have been damaged in someway as while it shows the SSD in the bios the windows recovery tools dont detect any current windows install and are only registering the secondary hard drive as being connected and lists it as the c drive. Should I just send it in for repairs, open it myself or is there any other way to fix it myself? Any help would be welcome.
skyfie 3 14" not booting properly
- Thread starter scr280
- Start date
Firstly, to perhaps put your mind at east, opening up the case and disconnecting/reconnecting the harddrives will not void your warranty as long as you take care and don't damage anything else when doing so.
It could be that something is has been disconnected etc, in the first instance I'd take a look at the SSD and disconnect it then reconnect it before firing up your laptop again. Might be that a cable is loose etc. This often fixes issues.
Failing that certainly try to boot with only the second HDD installed but you'd obviously need to install windows on it to get anywhere. That could certainly work should the SSD be damaged/corrupt etc.
If nothing else works I'd advise getting in touch with PCS to request a replacement SSD (or at least get their ideas on further diagnosis as required).
It could be that something is has been disconnected etc, in the first instance I'd take a look at the SSD and disconnect it then reconnect it before firing up your laptop again. Might be that a cable is loose etc. This often fixes issues.
Failing that certainly try to boot with only the second HDD installed but you'd obviously need to install windows on it to get anywhere. That could certainly work should the SSD be damaged/corrupt etc.
If nothing else works I'd advise getting in touch with PCS to request a replacement SSD (or at least get their ideas on further diagnosis as required).
Thanks steaky I managed to fix the problem, I installed windows 8 on the secondary hard drive like you suggested and was able to view the SSD in windows through the admin tools and it seems the file system got corrupted so it couldnt be read. Thankfully I had everything almost everything backed up on my secondary drive and was able to use some recovery software to get the stuff that wasnt and when that was done I formatted it and reinstalled windows on the SSD and it seems to be working again so its was hopefully just a software problem rather than the hardware.