Disk Boot Failure and strange behavior

[Craftyman.]

So I go to log in today and I lo and behold I get the dreaded DISK BOOT FAILURE screen we all dread. I quickly restarted and tried again and I everything seemed be going fine, POST'ed and logged in well. Until I started to play some Diablo III. About 20-30min in and it just hard locked and restarted the whole computer. Temps were fine, 60c at max on the hottest 6950. Didn't get a DISK BOOT FAILURE screen but I suspect these two problems are linked because letting my computer idle for 30minutes will cause it to restart and get a DISK BOOT FAILURE.

Inserting system disk does not help. ChkDsk does nothing? Memtest greenlighted my memory, no errors found. Took off all overclocks and same behavior. I'm beginning to suspect either my SSD is about to punch its ticket, or my Mobo doesn't feel like working any more, maybe?

Is all hope lost?! Will try changing video drivers as I installed Catalyst 12.5 beta a few days before Diablo III was released but i could play diablo just fine for a few days. will roll back to about 12.2. BTW the hard lock also happens with DOTA 2 I suspect it happens with all games.

Didn't really do anything that would cause this behavior, it just started on 5/18 friday when I got up.

[Craftyman.]

Alright little update, it actually doesn't matter what I'm doing (I could be browsing the internet, playing a game, idling, whatever) about an hour after rebooting the entire system will hard lock with no chance of recovery. Oddly, most of the time I can still move my cursor. Sometimes it will restart on its own, but mostly I'll need to hold in the power button to get it to shut down.

I tried switching out the cables on my SSD (its a crucial M4), didn't change anything. Ran a couple more passes of memtest, no errors found. Arrgh! this is so frustrating! I really have no clue here.

[bamtan2]

So I go to log in today and I lo and behold I get the dreaded DISK BOOT FAILURE screen we all dread.

as soon as that happens you swap the drive out for a new one. if you dont have a backup, that is bad, and so your first task becomes making a backup. you stop booting up to the faulty disk. you book up on usb to parted magic, gparted clone the disk to another, or use ddrescue to make a cloned image. this is because you must assume the disk breaks imminently.

if you're asking the internet if you disk is broken, nobody can tell you that. you have to replace the disk to know.

[thegoatman]

I've gotten the dreaded "DISK BOOT FAILURE" screen on a bad batch of RAM, actually. Anything that processes data, and can corrupt it, can throw this error. Before throwing out your HDD, run some stability tests on your components.