Ok it only looks as if the system may have died, but there is an easy way to fix it. It took me quite a while to figure what the cause was and it turned out to be a combination of an exFat partition on Intel RAID. Here is my system:
GA-Z77X-D3H
Revision 1.0
BIOS F15
Intel Rapid Storage Technology - Option ROM - 11.1.0.1413
Two OCZ Vertex 4 256 GB SSD's (Intel ports 0 & 1, RAID-0 array #1)
Three Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM HDD's (Intel ports 2,3, & 4, RAID-0 array #2)
LG BH10LS30 Bluray SATA Drive (Marvell port 6, ACHI mode)
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64
The symptoms? After getting Windows 7 installed and configured, I would initialize array #2 as a single GPT partition and format it as exFat using Diskpart. Then I would stick my Acronis True Image 2011 boot disc into the optical drive and reboot in order to back everything up. Sadly the system would fail to boot at this point. All discs known to work fine, like my Windows 7 installation disc, would not work in the Bluray drive at all. The boot drive, array #1, would stop working as well. I'd just end up at a blank screen. There was also no way to get into the BIOS as the delete key would also stopped working when this happened. The only thing that still worked was CTRL+I to get into the Intel option ROM for setting up RAID arrays. It seemed at the time that the only way to get things working again was to clear the CMOS, only this seemed to result in a corrupted boot partition, requiring me to reinstall Windows from scratch and start the loop all over again.
This was all very puzzling and took a lot of trial and error to figure out. In the end it turned out to be the exFat partition that was to blame. It was causing the system to get stuck immediately after the Intel option ROM loaded. Hence why I'm writing this post, just in case someone else runs into this problem and believes their PC is dead when it's actually not.
The true fix is really quite simple. Just delete the RAID array that was formatted as exFat, then recreate the array again. You'll lose all the data on it unfortunately, but the system will boot normally again. NTFS doesn't cause this problem so stick with that. I can't speak for other format types so use them at your own risk. Hopefully this will get fixed so exFat can be one day be used without causing the Intel RAID system to mess everything up. I wouldn't hold my breath though lol.
PS: If anyone want to give this issue a try, it's 100% repeatable. Just create an exFat partition on a RAID-0 array using Diskpart, then reboot. Then just try to get CD's/DVD's/Bluray's to launch in your optical drive or your Windows installation to boot.
