Corrupt Hard Drive Preventing Boot As Secondary

[Stylo]

Hey all. One of my hard drives is failing. It's not dead yet but it doesn't boot as a primary. When I install it as a secondary in my other PC it stops that PC from booting into windows. It just hangs on a black screen after the BIOS splash. I have the proper boot order selected in BIOS. Any ideas? Need more info?

My motherboard is MSI 990FXA
Both hard drives are SATA

 

[boosted1g]

Your BIOS is trying to identify all devices plugged into, even more importantly things plugged into SATA ports.
Some BIOS will try, call it bad, and move on, and others will just keep trying and keep trying.

So it is certianly possible that it will prevent a computer form booting.

If you want to try to fix the drive you will likely need to use a USB-SATA adapter and hopefully be able to fix mbr table or fix disk errors or whatever the issue calls for.

 

[Stylo]

Your BIOS is trying to identify all devices plugged into, even more importantly things plugged into SATA ports.
Some BIOS will try, call it bad, and move on, and others will just keep trying and keep trying.

So it is certianly possible that it will prevent a computer form booting.

If you want to try to fix the drive you will likely need to use a USB-SATA adapter and hopefully be able to fix mbr table or fix disk errors or whatever the issue calls for.

Ya thanks boosted1g. I stumbled upon similar suggestions. I have a stand Hitachi 7200 RPM 1 TB hard drive that i need to get files off of. Can you recommend an external usb hard drive cradle that i can try? under $20 would be lovely but if I have to pay more i will.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Stylo.

Basically, what @boosted1g said is correct about faulty drives preventing healthy ones to work properly and causing issues for the whole system. However, if you manage to get the computer to recognized the drive, you shouldn't try to fix anything. Your first priority here is data recovery, so that's where you'll need to start. Since we don't know the nature of the issue, you shouldn't risk using it for tests or repairs of any sort as this could make things worse. So the best case scenario is to get the computer to boot and recover the files via data recovery software: https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893.
Before you give it a try with an external connection (which is again a good suggestion), you could try using Ubuntu Live USB, to see if that OS is capable of recognizing and accessing the drives partitions so that you can transfer your files to a healthy HDD.

Hope that helps. Please keep us posted.
Boogieman_WD

 

[USAFRet]

I had the same/similar problem with a 2TB Seagate Barracuda drive - it all worked out fine with a USB enclosure (bypassing the BIOS hang). See more details in
Why is a secondary HDD preventing a BIOS boot-up?

6 year old thread.

Hopefully the OP is still not messing with this.