"Mayayana" wrote

| The boot manager and DVD drive disappear off and
| on, with no apparent pattern. I got the Win8.1 disk to
| run. It didn't need a key.

Last night I was able to test the hard disk and it
seems to be faulty. This AM I was able to boot the
BootIt CD with no hard disk in place. But I needed
to enable CSM to do it. I'm still a bit confused
about the effect of IDE vs AHCI, CSM enabled/disabled,
fast boot, etc. I need CSM to boot from at least
some CDs/DVDs. On the other hand, the Win8
install DVD wouldn't touch the GPT partitions with
CSM enabled. Once I disabled CSM it seemed to
work, but then complained about missing files. From
looking online I'm guessing that might be a result
of not have SATA drivers and needing AHCI/IDE
set to IDE.
At this point I think the the hard disk must be kaput
and am trying to figure out whether the rest is OK.
Memeory tests file. I would think the motherboard
must, then, be OK. ?