X1 crashes windows and somehow my boot drive is missing

Here's what happened,
- inserted Melodyne onto a clip.
- transferred audio to melodyne
- edited it.
- Closed melodyne and hit play
- Sonar gets a semi-opaque white overlay with the spinning circle of death
- I go do something in textedit, write down some setting I used in a plug.
- Go back, sonar's still dead so I Cntr+Alt+Del
- Windows locks up on trying to bring up the Task Manager (never done it before on Windows 7, I think that;s what it was doing).
- Reboot manually, Windows doesnt even see my damn boot drive.  Restart 3 times to this.
- Press F8, indeed no boot drive.
- Hard reboot, got it back up.
 
<rant>
Really... crash Windows so hard that my boot drive is missing?????
My bad if I did something wrong... but for real?
 
I think I'm gonna go back to Sonar 8 for a bit.  This is just not happening for me with X1.  Jesus.
</rant:sorry>

No box man.  I just got the screen :(
I'm usually pretty fluent with a 'pooter so I was patient, let the machine do it's thing.  But when I saw nothing could be done I did the ol' cntr+alt+del thing but that locked up my system totally.

I don't have a lame weak one either.
I thought my solid-state harddrive had died after a week of use haha.

SSD's are basically just a giant lump RAM. You have to do a hard boot sometimes to clear conventional RAM so I guess it kind of makes sense you might have to do it with an SSD.

My audio drive is old, I can't wait for SSD's to get a little cheaper than I'm going to pop for one.

When you get a WSOD and no box, that sux. It has happened to me before, but it's very rare, and usually followed by a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and my PC reboots automatically. But I've never had a case where my boot drive disappeared. I'd have a heart attack. LOL!

Are you using 64bit X1?  If so and you are using 32bit bitbridged plugins in the project a dialogue box can get hidden behind one of those quite easily.  The way to solve those is they usually appear on the task bar.  Minimize them from the task bar.

A possible cause for the initial problem may be too low a buffer for melodyne to function.  If you set your buffers low for recording at low latency jacking the buffers up for mixing, especially with a program like melodyne is a good idea. 

With the reboot not finding your boot up drive I have a strange question for you.  Do you happen to have a Kobo book installed?  When I installed mine for some unknown reason it altered my BIOS and put itself in the boot up sequence.   That was pretty much the dumbest installation procedure I have ever encountered.

If Windows is not seeing your boot drive, you have much more serious problems than anything Sonar is doing.

As for the don't use SSD's thing, I've had an SSD system drive for almost a year now, used it every day, no issues.

Pricey yes, but they are coming down in price:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/K...=1309858922&sr=1-4

The drive disappearing sounds like a failing drive. Did you run a disc check on that drive, if you are ever able to see it, again?

I did a hard-reboot (hold down power, shut off, turn on) and everything was fine again.  I installed Sonar 8.3.1 32-bit and haven't had any issues on my 64-bit machine.  I ALSO can now use my UAD-1 card again thus far.

Good 'nuff for me.
And if my drive dies at a week old I'll stab the shop that built it for me and recommended the SSD.  I was very very careful about them due to reports of dying drives.