BIOS doesn’t recognize hard drives

[masdeoh]

Hello!

I got a new hard drive, but didn’t realize the daisy chain of SATA power cables only had three.


A buddy of mine lent his cable which daisy chained four. I hooked them all up, and in anticipation I sort of stuffed in the cables without doing proper cable management.


One of the older SSDs seemed to short out, because I quickly began to smell burning plastic. I disconnected the power and took out the ssd to find it was super hot. So I figured it was busted


Only problem, that ssd had my copy of Windows on it. So now my computer had nothing to boot to. I swapped back in the previous SATA power I had, just without the offending ssd. It wasn’t able to boot, but it DID show all the hard drives.


Before I had done this, I actually copied over the drive to the new harddrive I bought (this was before I knew my buddy had given me the cable) so I was hoping I could salvage it. However after lots of trial and error it wasn’t working. So I ate dinner, and popped in my copy of Windows on a USB to just start with a fresh installation.


However this time ALL the drives were gone. Nowhere to be found. I tried the boot menu, and I looked in the bios. For all the SATA ports, it says empty.


I tried replugging in the power, swapping out SATA cables, restoring the bios to default settings, and resetting the CMOS. Nothing seems to work.


Any ideas? I’m really racking my brain here... I just wanna play rocket league


TL;DR: my hard drives aren’t showing up in the bios, so I can’t install Windows to any of them. I changed the cords, and reset the settings and CMOS but to no avail

 

[rocktalkrock]

Have you tried booting with just 1 hard drive connected?

 

[shknawe]

Does it recognize your usb, and did you remove it before trying to restart?

 

[masdeoh]

Have you tried booting with just 1 hard drive connected?

Yup, it still doesn’t seem to see it.

 

[masdeoh]

Does it recognize your usb, and did you remove it before trying to restart?

yeah it sees my usb just fine, but I can’t install Windows to any hard drive because it doesn’t see any harddrive

 

[rocktalkrock]

Can you list the parts in your system? It might help.

 

[shknawe]

You are going to have to take the drives to a friends computer and see if they are recognized on their computer. If they are you have a motherboard problem. If not then you have bad drives, which I doubt all three would go belly up. I would go back to the slot/port you had the burning smell of plastic, which is very bad sign, and see if you can determine a meltdown of the power source.