HDD not recognized after removal

[Hiteryan]

Three days ago while I was normally using my desktop some smoke started coming out from the front of it. I immediately shut it down and only a few hours ago I realised what the problem was. My HDD's sata power cable was partially melted.

Before discovering what the problem was, I removed the HDD and put it in an external hard drive bay and connected it via USB to my laptop to backup some data. Now that I put the hard drive back in my desktop, I used another sata power cable to connect it, but now it seems that the system only recognizes my SSD (where Windows is installed) and not the HDD. The drive is spinning but it doesn't show anywhere on my BIOS or disk manager.

Before resotring to removing my GPU so I can switch SATA ports/cables, is there anything else I could try out? Could this be a driver/software issue? Could using it as an external hard drive affected it in some way?

 

[crinkdude]

Did you try in a different sata port?

 

[Hiteryan]

Did you try in a different sata port?

Just did that, I tried 3 different SATA ports (including the original one which was previously working) with two different cables. Still not showing up in my list of bootable devices or anywhere else for that matter.

 

[crinkdude]

Do you think maybe the PSU is the problem? Any way of trying with another one?

 

[Hiteryan]

Do you think maybe the PSU is the problem? Any way of trying with another one?

Could the PSU be the problem? The disk does spin, it's running, I believe it would make more sense to be a mobo issue. But everything was working just fine, and if there's a problem with the SATA ports on the mobo, at least the one where the SSD is connected still works just fine as I can boot into Windows no problem. And I know the HDD works because just yesterday I connected it externally to my laptop. Do I have to reset the BIOS or something? Is this a thing that can happen when using a SSD as main drive and removing/re-inserting the HDD?

 

[crinkdude]

I would still try changing the PSU. If you want to test your sata ports, plug the SSD into each one and see if it boots.