Hard drive not recognized in BIOS after adding two SSDs.

nashrobinson

Prominent
Jun 29, 2018
2
0
510
Build info:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jchjQZ

Relevant components here:
Gigabyte - Z370P D3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Samsung - 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
Crucial - MX500 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive


I've been running off of the Caviar Blue hard drive for a while now and just recently added the two SSDs. I installed the 970 Evo in the M.2 slot and the MX500 into a SATA port. I had no issues with any of the drives initially. I was able to find both new SSDs in the drive manager in my existing windows installation on the WD HDD and create partitions. I then booted from a windows USB stick and all drives were shown as an option for my new windows installation.

I set up the Evo 970 as my boot drive, installed some drivers and such, then began downloading some games from Steam using the MX500 as a storage drive. At a certain point I got an error and that drive disappeared. I rebooted, went into BIOS, and couldn't find it there, either. I tried reseating it with a different power and SATA cable (borrowed from the old WD HDD) and still no luck. At a certain point my Evo 970 stopped being recognized, too, and I had to go into Windows recovery and set is as active again in the command prompt.

Long story short, I poked around the inside of my PC for a while trying to revive this SSD. At the end of the day I'm back where I want to be with the 970 Evo working as a boot drive and the MX500 as a storage drive, but now I can't get my old WD hard drive working at all. t's not recognized in windows, the device manager, or in BIOS. I suppose it's possible that I fried it while switching cables, but I'm hoping there's something configurable in BIOS that I'm missing here that could bring it back to life.

I should add: I've tested a second power source (with a larger capacity) and multiple SATA cables. I've also tried multiple SATA ports (as I do understand the 1st port is disabled when something is installed in the M.2 slot). All SATA ports are also listed as "enabled" on the BIOS screen.