Question Hard drive not detected

[Zajiba]

Currently frantically typing on mobile so my formatting will not be the best.

I am trying to move two laptop hard drives that have been working in a desktop into a new desktop.

Since the new desktop has UEFI boot support, I wanted to make use of the faster boot speed. So, I successfully converted both hard drives from mbr to gpt partition type in order to boot in UEFI. One of those drives has Windows 10 installed and the other is blank(wiped with diskpart clean in cmd).

After this, I removed the hard drives from the old desktop and connected them to the new desktop using the old desktop's PSU cables and SATA cables. I used one power cable for both SATA drives. When I tried to boot, I smelled smoke and powered down the new desktop.

I opened up the new desktop and noticed that the blank drive smelled very slightly of smoke, but the other drive with windows 10 installed on it did not smell like smoke.

I then tried to boot again and made it to BIOS. The motherboard in the new bios is an MSI z270-a pro. However, the bios did not detect the two drives at all, saying that there was nothing in the SATA ports that they were connected to. I verified that the cpu, ram, and gpu were all detected and powered. I felt no vibration and heard no noise from the drives when O powered on the desktop. The motherboard is im UEFI boot mode only with msi fast boot disabled and SATA hot plug support enabled.

At this point I realized that I might need to use the new desktop psu cables. I rebooted only with my windows 10 drive connected to SATA and PSU, but it still was not detected.

Then I tried to connect the hard drives back to the old desktop but they did not spin up or boot. I tried the trick where I disconnected the SATA cables and only left in the power cables to force spin up but nothing happened.

At this point I retrieved another hard drive with linux installed on it. This third hard drive is in gpt format as well. I used the new desktops psu cables to attach that hard drive and it did not spin on powering up the new desktop.

I also tried plugging the power cable for the drive into the other power cable slots on the newer PSU as well as other PATA power cable slots. I also tried using the other SATA data cable ports.

After this, I tried swapping the old PSU into the new desktop. I used the old power cables to connect the drives, atx power, and gpu to the old PSU. Again the drives were not recognized by BIOS.

The old psu is a 650W Corsair, and the newer psu is a 650W Gold certified EVGA psu. The newer desktop does boot to a windows installer flash drive but doesnt detect the hard drives at the windows install screen either.

Right now I am going to place the 3rd HDD i mentioned into a laptop and install windows on it as well as convert it from gpt to mbr and then change the mobo settings im the desktop to legacy bios and try to boot again.

I truly have no idea what to do after I try going back to legacy bios boot and would appreciate any assistance.

 

[popatim]

As you just learned, PSU cables are not universal. You've burned up some components on the drives.

Depending on the drives, it may or may not be easily repairable.
Please take some detailed pictures of both sides of the controller boards and post like to the images that you've hosted on sites such as ibb or imgur.

@fzabkar will want to see them to let you know if the TVS diodes are the likely candidate or if a board swap is possible.

 

[USAFRet]

You used cables from one PSU on another PSU? Corsair and EVGA?
There is NO standard between modular PSU cables. You've smoked at least one of the drives, possibly both.

Additionally, you almost certainly can't boot up a laptop drive+OS in a desktop system. It will almost certainly fail to boot, even without all the cable weirdness.

 

[Zajiba]

As you just learned, PSU cables are not universal. You've burned up some components on the drives.

Depending on the drives, it may or may not be easily repairable.
Please take some detailed pictures of both sides of the controller boards and post like to the images that you've hosted on sites such as ibb or imgur.

@fzabkar will want to see them to let you know if the TVS diodes are the likely candidate or if a board swap is possible.

It will take me a while to grab those pics, but do you know why the third drive is not being detected in either system? It shouldn't have been fried as I didn't mix and match cables when trying to boot with it.

 

[Zajiba]

You used cables from one PSU on another PSU? Corsair and EVGA?
There is NO standard between modular PSU cables. You've smoked at least one of the drives, possibly both.

Additionally, you almost certainly can't boot up a laptop drive+OS in a desktop system. It will almost certainly fail to boot, even without all the cable weirdness.

The old laptop drives that I have probably fried have been running in a desktop for the past 3 years with no issues. I don't have any super important data on them so I have chalked them up as a loss at this point but I'm not understanding why my third drive is not being recognized.

 

[AllanGH]

Try switching SATA ports on the motherboard to SATA ports which were not in use when the drives were fried.

 

[Zajiba]

Try switching SATA ports on the motherboard to SATA ports which were not in use when the drives were fried.

I have tried that as well as used different power cable ports.

 

[AllanGH]

Yeah....motherboard may have been toasted as well.