Why did the computer freeze during the bios post-test?

Question

Iron

A friend has a problem with a computer. suddenly it stopped loading and began to freeze, probably during the post-test stage.
motherboard BIOSTAR Hi-Fi B85S3+ Ver. 6.x, some kind of Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, Hitachi 1Tb hard drive
The code of the current post-test is displayed in the corner, it stops at A2 or A3 (this is probably affected by the choice of the sata controller in the BIOS - IDE or AHCI
) Bios won't let you enter
If you turn off the hard drive , then everything works, if you connect it via a USB-SATA adapter, it also hangs
Booted from live-cd, connected this screw using usb-sata - everything is seen, everything works, file systems are normal . I tried all sorts of fixes and similar utilities - it didn’t get any easier.
I updated the firmware to the latest, the result is the same
I had another screw with the OS installed at hand - I hook it up instead of the native one - it loads, it works, so the problem is in the hard drive
I thought - maybe there are some physical problems with the screw, I made a copy using Acronis to the disk from which the computer was booted (a little higher I wrote about no ) - I connect - and from this disk with the same post-code it stopped running. I conclude that the problem is logical - the BIOS finds something unnecessary on the hard drive and hangs, but what?
probably the problem will be solved by erasing the hard drive and a new installation of the system, only there is some necessary and expensive software that I didn’t install, so it would be better to raise this Windows.
Any ideas what can be done?
I tried the boot recovery tool from 7ki, it finds the same problem, supposedly fixes it, but after a reboot and a new iteration, it finds the same problem.
there are 3 partitions on the disk - reserved by the system with a bootloader, system and data
, I still plan to try the cloned screw on another computer today - I will decide whether it will boot from it or not

Answer 1

transfer to another screw then did not help.
the problem was in the 0th sector of the hard drive. Zeroing it completely - the freezes stopped, but the partition table was lost. "Restoring" some kind of soft table, the contents of the sector became different, but the freezes returned. unfortunately I don’t remember how I corrected it, but the Windows remained alive.

Answer 2

I updated the firmware to the latest, the result is the same

Firmware or BIOS?

Answer 3

Check this screw on the smart drive mhdd, create a copy of the screw naturally on another PC, then run this screw mhdd with the erase command, drive the copy back and check the operation of the PC

Answer 4

buy a new hdd, transfer the win image there. Save your nerves, time and "expensive" software.