Evil Motherboard

My motherboard is constantly conspiring against me, doing everything it can to ensure that my computer does not work. The worst of these issues, its that it refuses to boot my hard drive. It says "disk read error," but it is just framing the hard drive for its atrocities. I might have believed it, if it weren't for the fact that this issue happened with the last hard drive I had as well. Multiple fixes have worked in the past, but like a Cyberman, the evil motherboard adapts, forcing me to pile more extreme measures on top of each other. It started with just changing the SATA socket the hard drive was plugged into. Then I had to unplug the mobo from the power supply. Then I had to replace the SATA cable entirely. Then I had to remove the RAM and GPU. Then I removed the CPU and heatsink (cleaning them and replacing the thermal transfer compound, of course).

These fixes are now all obsolete, and I am out of ideas. Does anyone have anything? Please no "Just go buy a new mobo/hard drive/PC." If this were an option I would have done so already.

I have a Dell Dimension E520 that I have upgraded for entry level gaming performance. It's running a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 6 GBs of RAM, an R7 250, and Windows 8.1 (happened when I had Windows 7 too, so not an OS issue). It is also not a PSU issue, as mine has 680 watts.

@Maverick6585: Is your CMOS battery holding a charge correctly? I ask, wondering if the BIOS could be losing your configuration setting for Hard Drive access, i.e. AHCI or IDE mode. Also, have you checked that hard drive for errors? I wouldn't be so quick to say it absolutely can't be the hard drive. Hard Drives do fail. Other than the fans, they are the biggest mechanical parts in the computer.

Try running chkdsk /r with your Windows cd's recovery console.

If all of that is useless, check for a firmware upgrade for your Motherboard. They may have updated it to fix a specific issue like this. If not, they I'd say it's likely that your Sata controller is fried. Since you act like you've had these kinds of escalating problems for a while, that's what it sounds like. Maybe your MOBO got fried in a lightning storm or brownout. That would mean buying a new one.

Thank you for not only being the only person to reply, but also fir being helpful. I changed the CMOS battery to no avail. Now it is not booting into the Windows boot flash drive.

If you need me, I'll be cooking crystal meth to pay for my cancer and a new motherboard.

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