Question Asus TUF X570-plus first boot up destroyed 3 hard drives

[st4rbeast]

Friday I put together a new build (details below), connected my hard drives (1 SSD, 3 HDDS) and booted it up. It did not boot successfully the first time, it seemed to cycle a few times. Eventually I reset the CMOS and did a clean Windows install on the SSD. The other 3 drives were not showing up, I figured it was a BIOS issue. After failing to access them for a few hours, I reconnected them to the old motherboard (different CPU, Motherboard, power supply, etc). The old motherboard was no longer able to access them (it had succeeded in accessing them before the new build earlier in the day). I put the drives in a usb3 hard drive dock, they do not spin up and are not detected. I put the drives in a 2-bay drive cloner (no motherboard or OS required) and tried to clone them, they are not recognized. It appears that the PCBs on all 3 HDDs that were connected during that first failed boot got fried. I've been building and assembling computers for years and haven't had new issues and have never had any data loss. In this case, 1 of the drives was my main storage, another drive was the backup of that drive.

Has anyone had an experience like this with a new motherboard? I contacted Asus they said send the board in for RMA which really is not the issue I'm concerned about.

new build

ASUS TUF Gaming X570 plus
AMD Ryzen 3900X
OLOY DDR4 32GM RAM 3200MHz (2 Dimms)
EVGA 750 G5 Supernova
Intel SSD 256GB with Windows 10 64 bit

old build

Asus Z87 Pro
Intel i7 4770K
G.Skills DDR3 16GB 2133MHz (2 Dimms)
Corsair CX750M

drives

HGST 4TB
Seagate Barracuda 2TB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB

 

[RealBeast]

Best to do a new machine install with only the OS drive attached.

In any event, start up with everything attached and run a command prompt as an admin (right click run as admin) then type diskpart, and then type list disk. If you see more than the OS disk the others are probably just FUBAR from the install. List your results here if more than the OS shows up.

 

[st4rbeast]

Best to do a new machine install with only the OS drive attached.

In any event, start up with everything attached and run a command prompt as an admin (right click run as admin) then type diskpart, and then type list disk. If you see more than the OS disk the others are probably just FUBAR from the install. List your results here if more than the OS shows up.

I'm not very familiar with the diskpart utility, but I'm guessing that the bad drives would need to at least be detected as sata devices for this to work? They are not seen in BIOS under boot configuration or sata configuration in addition to not showing up in device manager. Otherwise, I will give this a try.

 

[RealBeast]

If they don't show up in diskpart they will not show up in anything. It's a pretty definitive tool.

 

[st4rbeast]

I tried it out but I only see the OS SSD, as the connected bad drive is not spinning

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          223 GB      0 B        *

 

[drivinfast247]

Remove the motherboard and make sure there's not a stray standoff causing a short.

 

[st4rbeast]

Remove the motherboard and make sure there's not a stray standoff causing a short.

Thanks, I will check this out. The motherboard appears to be stable since the CMOS clear and hasn't destroyed more drives.

 

[zeezz]

Hey @st4rbeast , did you get any resolution or fix your drives? Believe it or not I think I’m on the same situation with the same board. The interesting thing is the my SSDs are fine. But at least one drive is no longer reading even on my old system. Sigh.

 

[zeezz]

Hey @st4rbeast , did you get any resolution or fix your drives? Believe it or not I think I’m on the same situation with the same board. The interesting thing is the my SSDs are fine. But at least one drive is no longer reading even on my old system. Sigh.

False alarm actually - for anyone else who finds this, i had a few drives with the 3.3v issue that I forgot about. So.. all good here.

 

[st4rbeast]

False alarm actually - for anyone else who finds this, i had a few drives with the 3.3v issue that I forgot about. So.. all good here.

Glad to hear you did not follow in my footsteps. I did not fix the drives that were destroyed. Asus RMA'ed the board. For one of the destroyed drives, I bought new drive of the same model that had a matching part number on the PCB and swapped it over. That allowed the broken drive to spin up, so I know its good. If I wanted to access the data on there, I would have to unsolder a chip on the broken PCB and replace the one on the new drive (which I do not have experience with).

I had pretty good backups of my data on another hard drive that I keep in a safe, so I just fell back to that. Mostly I lost 3 months of edited photos, but I still have the raw versions of those photos. If I was losing more, I would probably have paid the $800-$1000 that it costs to recover data off of a drive that just has a bad PCB (and pushed harder to get Asus to cover that cost). I did not hear back from Asus as to whether they discovered any flaws or issues with the original board.