Internal Hard Drive not recognized in one computer, but is recognized in another

[Dr_Acula_MD]

My wife's desktop just suddenly stopped recognizing the internal hard drive that she has been using for a couple of years. It's a Seagate 2 TB hdd, and hasn't given her any trouble until now. It won't post now, it goes to an error saying "Reboot and Select proper Boot device."

My first thought was to immediately test the drive on my own computer, and to my surprise, not only did my computer recognize the hard drive, it was able to fully boot to Windows from it. This led me to think that the problem was with the motherboard, but when I then moved the hard drive from my personal computer over to my wife's, it was immediately recognized. We have identical Seagate 2 TB drives. Her system is still recognizing her SATA DVD drive as well.

We both have Windows 10, and there haven't been any changes to the hardware recently. I am going to try an external enclosure and see if her computer recognizes the hard drive that way, but at the same time I would like to get some answers, and see what would be the best long-term solution (hoping to avoid building a whole new machine right now) to get her up and running while salvaging the hard drive.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH community, @Dr_Acula_MD!

I'd recommend you attempt to connect her HDD back into her PC with a different SATA cable and also to a different SATA port on the motherboard. The issue might also be coming from outdated SATA controller & chipset drivers, so I'd suggest you check her motherboard/computer manufacturer's official website, find the model and make sure that she has the latest hardware drivers.
I believe it's most probably the SATA cable, so I'd start from there.

Keep me posted with the troubleshooting! Hope it works!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Dr_Acula_MD]

Welcome to the TH community, @Dr_Acula_MD!

I'd recommend you attempt to connect her HDD back into her PC with a different SATA cable and also to a different SATA port on the motherboard. The issue might also be coming from outdated SATA controller & chipset drivers, so I'd suggest you check her motherboard/computer manufacturer's official website, find the model and make sure that she has the latest hardware drivers.
I believe it's most probably the SATA cable, so I'd start from there.

Keep me posted with the troubleshooting! Hope it works!
SuperSoph_WD

Thanks for the response. I actually tried using the SATA cable that had been plugged in to her DVD drive (which it still recognizes) was plugged in with, and I also tried using a hard drive from my machine with the original SATA cable that was plugged in to her hdd. I tried multiple ports, including the one that the DVD drive was using so I know it is not the port or the cable.

I feel like I've ruled out every possible variable, and I'm stumped.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Thanks for the response. I actually tried using the SATA cable that had been plugged in to her DVD drive (which it still recognizes) was plugged in with, and I also tried using a hard drive from my machine with the original SATA cable that was plugged in to her hdd. I tried multiple ports, including the one that the DVD drive was using so I know it is not the port or the cable.

I feel like I've ruled out every possible variable, and I'm stumped.

Hey there again, @Dr_Acula_MD!

This seems unfortunate. 🙁 I'd recommend you check the SATA controller & Chipset drivers from the official motherboard/computer manufacturer's website. You should be able to find your wife's PC model there and all the available drivers & downloads for it, once you select the OS version that she is using. Make sure you manually install these drivers from there and also check for any BIOS version updates. If you haven't tried this already, a simple BIOS reset might help as well.

Hopefully, that would resolve the problem.
Let us know how it goes.
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Dr_Acula_MD]

Thanks for the response. I actually tried using the SATA cable that had been plugged in to her DVD drive (which it still recognizes) was plugged in with, and I also tried using a hard drive from my machine with the original SATA cable that was plugged in to her hdd. I tried multiple ports, including the one that the DVD drive was using so I know it is not the port or the cable.

I feel like I've ruled out every possible variable, and I'm stumped.

Hey there again, @Dr_Acula_MD!

This seems unfortunate. 🙁 I'd recommend you check the SATA controller & Chipset drivers from the official motherboard/computer manufacturer's website. You should be able to find your wife's PC model there and all the available drivers & downloads for it, once you select the OS version that she is using. Make sure you manually install these drivers from there and also check for any BIOS version updates. If you haven't tried this already, a simple BIOS reset might help as well.

Hopefully, that would resolve the problem.
Let us know how it goes.
SuperSoph_WD

So I selected yours as best answer, but I don't really know exactly what happened still, and I'm not 100% sure what ended up "solving" it, but I got it semi-working. A (long) summary of my journey, just for those who are curious:

I got an external enclosure for the hard drive, and then hooked it up to my computer. I made a back up on my hard drive of every file she could possibly want to save - photos, documents, everything except programs. Then I formatted the hard drive, and did a quick Google search to figure out how to set up a USB flash drive with a bootable Windows install deal. I move both the USB flash drive and the hard drive back over to my wife's computer, and proceed to try to install Windows on the now fresh hard drive. Luckily, her computer actually did find the drive now! However, I seemed to run into every possible error message while trying to get this working. First, Windows couldn't be installed to the drive because it was a MSR drive and not a GPT drive, so I had to figure out how to convert it using command prompt. But every time I tried, it would give an error telling me that I didn't have access to convert. I tried to format it again, but now I didn't have access to that somehow either.

After rebooting and giving it a rest, I tried again, and this time it couldn't even find the drive again. I was a bit worried, but I restarted, checked my SATA cable connection, and restarted again. This time, I was able to delete the MSR partition and convert the drive to GPT! I then installed Windows, and I thought I was in the clear. It automatically rebooted, and sure enough, there was the SATA Hard Drive as one of the boot options. However, it would look like it was starting, and then it would suddenly restart and the SATA Hard Drive was no longer there; the only option was the recovery USB flash drive. For some reason, this prompted me to just go through a cycle of re-installing Windows over and over.

Throughout this process, I must have reset the BIOS about 10 different times, including moving the little jumper thing over to the other pins, and removing the battery, and the software reset from the BIOS menu. I have no idea what finally did the trick, but eventually it stuck and was able to boot all the way to Windows from the hard drive. Now I am in the process of transferring back all of the backed up data from my computer.

Tl;dr version - I re-installed Windows multiple times, while resetting the BIOS multiple times, and eventually some combination worked and the hard drive is up and running again.

I am a little afraid that this is going to come up again, but I will update if that ends up happening.

Thanks to everyone who provided advice!