boot - Hard drive stopped working after trying to delete a partition

So I recently got an SSD, put it in my machine, installed my OS on it which is Windows 8.1 64bit, and after booting everything was perfect. I had an older hard drive of 1TB, and an SSD of 120GB. The 1TB hard drive was split into 4 different partitions of different size, but I had an OS installed on the old hard drive, figured I could just erase it afterwards.

So I basically formatted the 100GB partition of the hard drive, and then decided to delete it so it turns into free space which I can use to expand some other partition, unfortunately the whole deleting process wouldn't finish, I left it running for about 50 minutes and when I came back it was still loading, and it mostly just froze as I couldn't do anything. I figured it didn't even start deleting yet, so I gave my PC a restart, however it all went downhill from there. My hard drive seems to be defective, I tried disconecting my SSD for instance just to see if I could boot into a Windows CD, but no. As long as my hard drive is connected, I can't even get to BIOS or anywhere else, I just get a blank screen with "A3" written in the corner.

Is it corrupt? Can I fix it? Can I get my data off it at least? If you need more details please ask.

Answer

I've seen this sort of behavior with a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P motherboard, which uses an atrocity of a firmware that Gigabyte refers to as a "Hybrid EFI." If you care to read my tale of woe, I wrote it up on my Web page.

If your computer is based on a Gigabyte motherboard from about three years ago, it's entirely possible that you're running into Hybrid EFI problems. Your best bet in this case is to ensure that everything is booting in BIOS mode, from MBR disks. If anything is set up to boot in EFI mode or from a GPT disk (the two are tied together in the case of Windows), the firmware gets finicky and can hang if it doesn't like what it sees. Figuring out what's wrong is next to impossible. Personally, I managed to get it mostly working for about three years, but when I tried adding an SSD a few months ago, it collapsed and I was fed up enough to replace the thing.

Even if your computer is not built around a Gigabyte motherboard with a Hybrid EFI, it's conceivable that you've got something equally flaky. I've not run across them myself, but I've heard that there are a few other systems like Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI. They mostly date from around the same period; anything bought in the last year or two should use a more robust system.

That said, it's also possible that your disk(s) itself/themselves are defective and causing the problems. Attaching them one at a time to another computer, running SMART tests, and backing up your critical data would be in order.