Motherboard has started to be unable to find hard drive

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Oct 5, 2014
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I've been using an ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA motherboard for three years now. I have had two drives, a 1TB HDD and a 128GB SSD, for the same amount of time. The SSD has the OS and some essential programs on it, and the HDD has everything else. Recently, I tried to use a program on the HDD and it said that the drive could not be found. When I restarted the computer, both drives weren't showing up in bios. I switched the SATA ports for both drives and that worked for a bit, but again now it can't find the HDD. I tried switching the SATA cable and the SATA port for it, but still nothing. Any suggestions?
 
Solution
techgeek
As my last post mentioned, I thought it could be one of the drives causing the problem.

Since you don't have another computer to try it in, do you have another drive to try in this computer? If the drive is failing Seatools, something is wrong with it. Does it give you any sort of error code?
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I just tried that. The bios will recognize one or the other, but not both at once. However, the OS will find both drives, but it'll only run programs from the SSD. If I try to run a program from the HDD, the program won't open or it will and then not respond.
 
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The HDD is a Seagate ST310005N1A1AS-RK 1TB and the SSD is a Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2CCA 2.5" 128GB.
The SSD is in SATA3G_1 and the HDD is in SATA3G_2. The SATA controller is in AHCI.

 
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Ok, I downloaded you motherboard manual. I was thinking if you had a third-party controller and you had them plugged into that, it could be causing you problems. However you motherboard only has Intel controllers so it's not that.

First off, I would plug your SSD into SATA6G_1. Technically speaking having your HDD in SATA6G_2 will work, but a HDD won't benefit from using the 6G port so plug it into SATA3G_1.

This will give you the most benefit from your SSD. Hopefully it will sort out the issue your having, though I suspect it won't.

Let me know and I'll give you some other things to try.
 
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Okay, I tried that, and it only seems to be picking up the HDD in the 3G port. The BIOS doesn't seem to be detecting anything in the 6G ports (both drives were in the 6G ports before all the problems were happening).

Also, would updating the BIOS help, or would it be a waste of time?

 
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It couldn't hurt to do a BIOS update, but my gut tells me that won't help. I say that because if it was working before and now all of a sudden it's not, something has gone sideways.

It could be one of the drives causing the problem. Do they consistently work on there own, or have you had any problems where you tried only one drive and the motherboard failed to detect it.

The last option is motherboard. It's been a long time since I've heard of SATA ports outright failing, but it's happened. Something in the chipset could have been damaged.

Do you have another computer you can try both drives in? If so see if that computer will detect both drives whilst plugged in at the same time. This could help narrow down the problem.
 
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Unfortunately, I don't have another computer that I could put the drives in, just my laptop.

As I was plugging and unplugging them to see how they worked on their own, I eventually found that while the HDD was in SATA3G_2 and the SSD was in SATA3G_4, it only showed the HDD in the boot menu, but it showed the SSD as being plugged in. I set the SSD as boot priority and everything ran normally for a bit. Then, any program I ran from the HDD would stop responding or it wouldn't open at all.
I actually downloaded Seatool for Windows and ran a few tests on each drive. The SSD was fine and passed, but the HDD failed both a generic test and a fix, so right now I'm guessing it's a problem with the hard drive.
 
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As my last post mentioned, I thought it could be one of the drives causing the problem.

Since you don't have another computer to try it in, do you have another drive to try in this computer? If the drive is failing Seatools, something is wrong with it. Does it give you any sort of error code?
 
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Solution
Sorry about the long delay.
I'm a little confused as to what I'm looking for, so I hope this is what you're asking for.
When I scroll over the Health Status is says:
Caution: [05] Reallocated Sectors Count: 528
[C5] Current Pending Sector Count: 32
[C6] Uncorrectable Sector Count: 32

Those same ID's are yellow on the list. It says:
Reallocated Sectors Count Current: 100 Worst: 100 Threshold: 36
Current Pending Sector Count Current: 100 Worst: 100 Threshold: 0
Uncorrectable Sector Count Current: 100 Worst: 100 Threshold: 0
All the other ID's are blue.
 
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eAicmfwXGtRKuhvGTs6hCTwmMQPkwZwnHgtQdXjzWeDflLF3Nm8sTzGm9AufmtGsmXtS9N8GlBLjWvW0fvziMHlVmWGxOBBVYebYj_lzO_NhhHLv3PPa2qTZAFLg406VVA


Here's the screenshot.
 
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Sometimes this can be a little confusing. The first three columns are given in %. Current and Worst for 05 will count down from 100 together. The drive will be considered failed when it reaches the Threshold, in this case 36%. Your drive has a manufacturer determined amount of reserved space which is used to remap bad sectors too. As this is used up, the Current and Worst will drop to represent how much reserved space is left. According to your screenshot, you have 100% which should be good right? Well not really. You have a large amount of reserve space, but it's showing caution because it's started to use it. In this case you've used 1048 sectors (536576 bytes). Now it's hasn't moved the Current and Worst since you have much more reserve space, but you are getting the caution since it's started using some of it. C5/C6 are essentially telling you the same thing, but instead of the total it's telling you what its been dealing with recently.

For more information look here:

S.M.A.R.T. Info

What you need to take away from this, is the drive is failing. How much time it has left is uncertain. It could go on like this for months or longer, however it could die tomorrow. So these warnings should be taken seriously. If you have any data on the drive that you don't have backups of, take one now. Replace the drive as soon as possible. If this drive isn't very old, I would RMA it.
 
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Sorry I still need help.
Okay, so I backed up the failing hard drive and took it out. I just got a new one and put it in, partitioned it, etc.
The problem I'm having is that it still keeps saying that the old drive can't be found, and when I tried installing a program onto the new drive that was previously on the old drive, it said that program was already installed.
 
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You say it can't find your old drive, do you mean your SSD?

As for when you are installing a program and it tells you it's already installed, were they installed on the HDD? If so that can be an issue. Since your boot drive is the SSD, all installed programs hook into the registry and Program and Features. Since this information is kept on the drive with Windows on it (your SSD), then when you try to install it, it doesn't know that the old HDD is gone and according to Windows those programs are already installed. It doesn't matter that the actual program was installed on the HDD.

I'm not sure how you backed up the old HDD, but if you did a complete backup of it (programs and everything) then you should be able to just restore the data to the new HDD and Windows won't know anything has changed.
 
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