Bios does not spin up hard drive, but Linux does

[Wolfmade]

Hello!
I have a rather strange problem. I hope you guys can help me. I apologize for my rather poor English as it's not my first language.

My Windows machine just flat out stopped booting one day. I looked at the boot screen and it does not detect my SAMSUNG internal (and only) hard drive. I made a Linux Mint live USB, ran it on my PC and used gparted, which listed the drive fine and I could access files. Weird, I think. I reboot and it boots into Windows.
The very next day, it doesn't show the drive again. This time I did some testing. I installed Linux onto my hard drive and wiped everything, also changing the hard drive filesystem from NTFS to ext4. Sadly, this didn't fix my issue. I tried using the Live USB. When I selected "Boot from hard drive" from the unetbootin Live USB menu, I can hear the drive spin up and when busybox comes up, writing "reboot" restarts the PC and boots me into my Linux installation!
What I figure is that BIOS, for some reason, does not want to power my hard drive on, but doing it from the Live USB actually sends power to the hard drive. I tried Googling and some people have said that it might be because of a PSU issue. Can that be the case?

What I have tried to fix the problem:

• 
  updating the bios
  formatting everything on the hard drive
  fsck, disk repair, bootup repair and whatnot
  installing another OS
  turning it on and off again

What I have not tried:

• 
  anything to do with opening up the PC
  switching cables
  etc

Anybody have a clue?

PS. I have a Gigabyte GA-P61-USB3-B3 motherboard and I'm using the latest, F11 BIOS. And have been for a long time. Running memtest+ for 48hrs did not report any errors.

 

[hang-the-9]

Your issue is not with the BIOS not seeing the drive, if it was not, then the Linux setup would not see it. Are you sure that Linux is booting off the drive and not the USB stick? If it's a "Live" setup it is setup to run from external media not the local hard drive.

First thing you need to do is reseat the hard drive connections, trying a new drive cable is a good idea also.

Then go into the BIOS, and see if it sees the hard drive, not just in the boot order but in general.

Did you try re-installing Windows?

 

[Wolfmade]

Your issue is not with the BIOS not seeing the drive, if it was not, then the Linux setup would not see it. Are you sure that Linux is booting off the drive and not the USB stick? If it's a "Live" setup it is setup to run from external media not the local hard drive.

First thing you need to do is reseat the hard drive connections, trying a new drive cable is a good idea also.

Then go into the BIOS, and see if it sees the hard drive, not just in the boot order but in general.

Did you try re-installing Windows?

I'm 100% sure it's booting off of the hard drive and not the live usb. The BIOS literally has nothing after "IDE Master 0" when I "normal boot" it but my hard drive is there when I reboot from the USB. Same goes for the boot order.

Yes, I've tried re-installing windows and also ran the startup repair utility. Windows setup does NOT see my drive unless I reboot from a linux live usb.

 

[hang-the-9]

Try setting the BIOS to defaults.

Does Windows try to load but then does not show you a drive to install on? Try changing the HD settings from AHCI to ATA or Legacy and try again if there is no drive.

If the Windows setup is done with a USB drive, make sure you are using a USB 2 port not a 3 or you will have it trying to load but then it won't find the files it needs.

 

[fzabkar]

@Wolfmade, it appears that your drive has been configured to Power Up In Standby (PUIS). You could use a tool such as hdparm or HDAT2 to disable PUIS. You will need to launch HDAT2 with the /w switch to wake up your drive, then disable PUIS.

HDAT2 /w

See also http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_tp-windows_install/build-9879-bricking-drives/bd3fdbc9-ea72-4ac7-a824-3e0cad9759c9