Did I blow all four hard drives

[Tim Hole]

I tried to install a second GPU into a 5yr old rig and once it had been installed, the computer would no longer see any of my installed drives. I tried hooking up a different internal drive to all the SATA ports to see if I can get the comp to register it, to no avail. I tried everything I could think of to the point where I thought I had knackered my MOBO or the SATA ports at least.

I decided to install a new MOBO I already had which is going to be part of a rendering node, still couldn't get the BIOS to read them. I then get the aforementioned spare hard drive, that wasnt in this rig, hooked up and installed windows on it.

I have a USB hot swap bay for drives and I've tried all the drives and windows is not reading them.

Have I blown the SATA ports on all these drives or something?

The only thing I did on my old rig was to use and adapter for two Molex plugs to a six pin PCI-e in order to power the second GPU, which the computer guy in the shop said it should be fine to do...now i'm not so sure.

Any thoughts would be welcome.

Thanks.

Tim

 

[kanewolf]

My thought is your power supply is not providing stable voltages to the drives. The second GPU caused either the 12V (likely) or 5V to drop.

 

[Tim Hole]

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. But how is that going to affect all my hard drives in both old and new rig, with only one GPU installed.

Do you think I just damaged the SATA ports?

 

[kanewolf]

I guess I never picked up on there being multiple power supplies or a single GPU configuration from the original description. Does the USB adapter have a separate power supply?

 

[Tim Hole]

It's an external dock that takes both SSD and full HDD and yes has it's own power.

It's the same power supply as before but the only drive out of the five that the new build can now see is an old raptor drive that I had in an external enclosure, which now has windows installed on it.

I've tried hooking the dock up to another computer and it can't see the disks either.

 

[hang-the-9]

It's not out of the realm of possibility that some power supply issue killed the drives, although odd that all would have the exact same issue. If they are not even detected in the BIOS of any computer, they are very likely dead and would need at least a board swap to try to fix them.

 

[kanewolf]

Yeah, I unfortunately concur with @hang-the-9. If the USB won't communicate with the disks on ANY host, then something got hosed.

 

[Tim Hole]

Thats what I'm resolved to now. Short of getting the PCBs swapped out there isn't much I can do. First time this kind of thing has happened to me.

Oh well.

Thanks for your input everyone.

Much appreciated.

 

[popatim]

What the model# of the drives in question, theres protection circuitry that can go south and cause this symptom; usually TVS diodes and (hopefully) some kind of fuses.

 

[Tim Hole]

The drives in question are: an SSD from crucial, 2x Samsung Spinpoint 1TB and a Barracuda 2TB.

So it's a span of types and brands