Hard drive only showing up in the bios once after a hard reboot

[PlayWithFire]

This will be a little verbose, but I feel that context my help. A few days ago, I went to reboot my Windows 10 computer, and it didn't come back online. I saw an error that was written out to a log file, complaining about a corrupted bootres.dll. After a day or two of trying to fix it, I wiped the system, and re-installed Windows 10. During the install process, I saw a bunch of system partitions on Disk 0 (my SSD) so I deleted them all, because I didn't think they mattered.

After the install completed, I noticed that only two of my three hard drives were showing up in Windows Explorer.
In disk management, the missing drive was being detected, but I couldn't initialize it. I then noticed that in device manger, the drive was showing up as "unknown device".

Next, I started looking in the BIOS, and didn't notice the drive there either. Here's when it got really weird. I pulled the power cable from the PC, took out the drive, re-seated all the cables, and the driver showed up on the initial boot screen, as well as inside the BIOS. However, after a reboot, the drive is gone again. I can get to show up if I pull the power cable, and turn the PC on again.

At this point, I don't care about the data on the drive because I have it backed up. I just want to know if I can salvage it.

 

[jay32267]

Did you install Windows with more than one drive connected?
I've had problems similar to what you're having by doing that.
I would reinstall Windows with only the SSD connected.
Once you get into Windows and everything is fine....shutdown and connect the other drives and power up. Then I would go to the BIOS and check if they are there and make sure the boot order has the Windows drive at the top and SAVE the BIOS.

 

[PlayWithFire]

Did you install Windows with more than one drive connected?
I've had problems similar to what you're having by doing that.
I would reinstall Windows with only the SSD connected.
Once you get into Windows and everything is fine....shutdown and connect the other drives and power up. Then I would go to the BIOS and check if they are there and make sure the boot order has the Windows drive at the top and SAVE the BIOS.

Reinstalled without any drives plugged in, set up windows, plugged in the drives. No luck, same exact behavior.

 

[jay32267]

So if it's only one drive not showing up sometimes.
I would get what I needed to off of it and replace it.

 

[PlayWithFire]

So if it's only one drive not showing up sometimes.
I would get what I needed to off of it and replace it.

After a few hours of messing around with this, and plugging the drive into another machine, I called it quits and decided to replace the entire drive. Maybe I could fix this, but I don't want to waste many days of my life just to save a $100. Thankfully, I had the data backed up offsite, so I just going to restore it and move on.

 

[jay32267]

I think that was wise.