This a long shot but one never knows... I assume that your system connection is SATA. You might try connecting the drive to a different SATA port. Years ago during the time of Windows Vista I had a failure. The drive connection was IDE, not SATA, and I changed IDE ports and all was fine. It is not impossible that you have a failed SATA port. Like I said it is a long shot but not impossible.

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My motherboard only has 6 SATA ports and guess what, i have 6 drives connected, 2 are SSD and 4 are IDE
I have a 7th device, a DVD drive but i only connect that if i really have too by pulling a non system drive, and i can't remember the last time i've needed to do that.

That said, i will keep it in mind because at this point i really have no idea what's going on.... this morning the PC booted up with no issue but it occasionally does that so unless something fails catastrophically this is going to be a long term issue to nail down.

WOW! You still have IDE drives connected? How old is this system?

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Clearly i got my terminology wrong

There are "4" that are old style mechanical drives with SATA connectors (i.e. not SSD), the other 2 are SSD ... there are no IDE connectors on the motherboard

That said, one of the drives must be at least 10 years old by now and it's always amazed me it hasn't failed yet.

I rather figured that was the case but couldn't pass on being dramatic.

I have a few drives around that old.

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Damn drama queens!

I'll have you know that I am NOT a drama queen. I am a drama king!

Hey Doddie, just curious. Do you remember the brands of the drives that have lasted forever? Mine are all Hitachi (now HGST) Desk Stars and Ultra Stars.

The two best drive manufacturers I've experienced were Hitachi and Maxtor. Both were bought out but Hitachi's quality was maintained. Seagate bought out Maxtor but only to remove competition. They did not maintain the quality of Maxtor. Hitachi was bought out by Western Digital but they maintained the drives as the sub brand, HGST, keeping the quality.

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My bad, whatever you say, Sire


An interesting question and one that i thought i would be able to answer easily, but as it turns out i don't actually have all the drives installed i thought i did... how to explain this?

First off, 2+ years of not really not knowing what was happening explains it in part...

Fast forward too today:-

I just checked Speccy and it lists my drives as:

CT2000BX 500SSD1 SATA Disk Device (SSD)
Crucial_ CT275MX300SSD1 SATA Disk Device (SSD)
TOSHIBA HDWD120 SATA Disk Device
WDC WD10 EZEX-00WN4A0 SATA Disk Device
WDC WD20 EURX-63T0FY0 SATA Disk Device
CT1000MX 500SSD1 SATA Disk Device (SSD)

Clearly i have 3 x SSD drives and not the two i thought i had (recap, my current motherboard only has 6 x SATA connectors with no other type available.)
My previous motherboard was a mix if IDE and and SATA connectors and one of the drives connected to that was a an IDE Maxtor DiamondMax 10, Mfg date 07/Nov/2004.

According to my Amazon order history i bought my current motherboard in Apr 2016 so it would make sense that i stopped using the Maxtor at the same time... if i had access to a motherboard with IDE capability i have no doubt the Maxtor would still work because it's been sitting in an anti-static bag ever since.

I remember that well because not long before i asked a question at the time what was the best way to dispose of old HDD's, the replies ranged from recycle to dump them out at sea... i had about 15 old HDD's, some that had failed catastrophically and some that were so small in data to be of no use in a modern computer but all of them held data that i would have no way of scrubbing so in the end i ripped them apart, smashed what chips i could access, removed the platter and took a 3lb hammer to that, not exactly an ideal solution but i disposed of each part seperately over a long period of time so if someone did find a platter they'd have no easy way to get my info from it or which make of HDD it came from.

Without pulling each drive from the tower and looking at the labels i can't say for sure how old the Toshiba and Wetern Digital drives are but i'm sure at least one or two of the WD drives is more than 10 years old because i pulled then from TV Set Tob Boxes that i'd owned for many years prior to 2016.
Fwiw, whenever i repurposed a drive, or bought a new one, i always looked at the manufacture date and i don't recall ever seeing one that was over a year older than when i first used it, in a PC or STB.

I'm pretty sure but i could be wrong, i think the WD drives are ex-STB.

The Toshiba drive is odd, i don't remember buying a Toshiba drive but clearly i did and it's partioned E through F of my data partitions. Next time i'm in my case i'll certainly pull that one to see what the Manufacture date was.

Edit: Just checked my Amazon history again, the Toshiba drive was purchased in 2017, so not that old.

I've orderded a new graphics card tonight that should arrive tomorrow, it's not a high end one but it is a step up on the GTX1050 i currently have, a GTX1650.

I've tried everything i can think of to try and get the GTX1050 to work normally but i think i'm flogging a dead horse.

When i reseat it it works for a few days but the issue always returns, then i read that it might be a failing DP or HDMI port, again that worked for a few days but eventually the black screen issues would resurface... in fact that's progressively got worse, pixilation in only parts of the screen when there should be a full screen etc.

Quite how the graphics card is the cause i really don't know but i suspect there might be a solder somewhere that needs heat after mutliple boots to make a full connection.

It could of course be the motherboard that's failing but if that was true then i can't understand why when i get past POST and Win7 loads, why is my PC then stable?

As an aside i thought this might be of interest to anyone, actually everyone with an Nvidia card still running Windows 7 who tries to install the lastest drivers from Nvidia...

Changes to the display driver installation process under Microsoft Windows 7
Updated 03/16/2023 12:15 PM
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5445/

cf: Enable Loading of Test Signed Drivers
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/the-testsigning-boot-configuration-option

The enabling of "Loading of Test Signed Drivers" does work but as soon as its disabled Win7 ignores the driver and reverts back to the basic 800 x 600 driver settings, ignoring the latest driver on my system... presumably because the WHQL certificate from Microsoft doesn't exist?

I had no idea 'loading of test signed drivers' was a thing, it also begs the question why don't Nvidia have their own certificates for end of life products given that Nvidia have commited to support Win7 graphic cards like mine with security updates until Sept 2024?

I'm still going to run into the driver install issues above with the 1650 card, but at the moment that's the least of my concerns.

Good luck, hope it works out. Too bad you couldn't put the old card in another to see if the issue carried over.

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Indeed, i used to use my wife's PC as a sort of test bed years ago, but when she wanted a Surface tablet <spit lol> a long tme ago her PC was dismantled and recycled.

Hey, be nice. I like my Surface. Of course I use it almost exclusively as an eBook reader.

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LOL, i actually rate the Surface my wife uses, it's just i prefer a full sized monitor and the flexibility of a PC, and i hate video conferencing.

That said, i never envisaged we'd all be locked down for a pandemic where i'd need a webcam, so i relied on her Surface for video conferencing with health professionals.

Oh, for anything but eBooks my surface's 10 inch screen is too small. Even my 15.6 Asus laptop is connected to a 27 inch external monitor. My main desktop is connected to 43 and 55 inch TV's; yes very large but I sit 8-9 feet from the screens.

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So, i swapped out my old GTX1050 for the new GTX1650 about 10 days ago and so far everything has run like clockwork, not a single bootup issue so i think it would be fair to say at this point the issue was with the video card.

Device manager does report 2 Code 28 errors under 'Other devices' though:

One for a 'PCI Device' and the other for a 'Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller' but my understanding is that this is because the video card has a USB port for VR headset usage that Win7 doesn't support... again this begs the question why did Nvidia release a Win7 specific driver with this function enabled when the software it was designed for was post end of life and could never support it?

Using the hardware id info from the problem devices i was able to source a post from Nvidia where they said this would not be an issue and the card would work perfectly so i don't have any concerns about that, indeed disabling the 'problem' devices makes no difference... annoyingly i can't find the source of that post in my history right now so i can't back that up.