My OS cannot see my HDD, but my BIOS can

[ComputerWhiz305]

I had an external drive, but recently the enclosure stopped working on it (no more power). Since it's out of warranty and I don't ever take it anywhere else, I decided to remove the drive from the enclosure and simply add it as a secondary drive in my desktop PC.

My BIOS detects that it's plugged in to a SATA port, but Windows 10 does not detect it and I'm not able to reformat the drive because Disk Management doesn't have it listed. So I tried removing my primary HDD, putting the secondary HDD in that SATA port and booting from a live Linux USB to use GParted. There have been a couple of cases where I have tried inserting a drive or USB and Windows can't see it, but Ubuntu can. However, Ubuntu does not see the HDD either.

I have a 600W PSU, so I should have more than enough power to run more than 1 HDD.

Any ideas or is the HDD just fried?

 

[Wgfalcon]

go into windows disk management and see if its listed there.

 

[Wgfalcon]

open file manager. right click on this pc choose manage and then disk management.

 

[ComputerWhiz305]

go into windows disk management and see if its listed there.

As stated in my original post, the HDD is not listed in Disk Management.

 

[Yoakim Anastasov]

Is it possible that this HDD doesn't support AHCI mode. Did you try to change the mode to IDE (legacy) for the port that you attaching the HDD to?

 

[ComputerWhiz305]

Is it possible that this HDD doesn't support AHCI mode. Did you try to change the mode to IDE (legacy) for the port that you attaching the HDD to?

Hadn't even thought of that. When I change the SATA port to IDE, I can see it in Ubuntu... sort of.

The first two times I booted from my live Linux USB, I would get some Input/Output Errors when opening Gparted. Then it said that there was no partition table on that drive.

Eventually, I got it to see the drive properly. I couldn't mount it to see the files, but Gparted could see it. Since the drive was empty anyway, I tried deleting the existing partition and creating an NTFS partition, which appeared to complete successfully, but the next time I booted into the live USB, Gparted showed the partition the way that it had previously been (as if it never made the format changes). I tried again with FAT32, but the same result.

I tried deleting the partition table and making a new msdos partition table, but that didn't work either. I'm no longer able to boot into Windows 10 when I have that drive connected to my system.

Safe to assume that the drive is toast at this point?

 

[Yoakim Anastasov]

Safe to assume that the drive is toast at this point?

Hmm, honestly I don't know gparted well, but are you sure that you wrote the changes to the disk finally? I saw this behavior with a dead flash drive, but with a HDD it's strange for me. Could you give it one more try, but with fdisk this time. You can see a documentation here for example: https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/fdisk_partitioning.html .
And don't forget to write the changes at the end with 'w'!
If it doesn't work again - let's declare it officially dead

 

[ComputerWhiz305]

Forgot to follow up with this one. Officially declared it dead.