New build not booting with second HDD

[Gene Razak]

Edit: The problem has been solved. Thanks everyone! Since we got there piece-meal fashion, I've added a little summary / guide to the end of this post

Hi!

I know this has been asked many times before, both here and elsewhere on the internet. But I couldn't find a working solution so, unfortunately, here I am.

The issue:
My new computer is working fine when only the main drive (SSD) is connected. When the second drive (HDD) is added, however, it stalls on the boot screen. On one occasion when I left it to run the computer seems to have turned itself off afer a while.

The system:
CPU: Ryzen 5 2400 G
Main: Gigabyte AB350N gaming wifi
PSU: 400 W BeQuiet pure power 10
SSD: Samsung Evo 850 500 GB
HDD: WD Caviar Green 1 TB (Used)
OS: Windows 10 Professional

Other notes:
- BIOS is up to date (v. F23d)
- Both drives are identified correctly in the BIOS
- Boot order is correct (manually booting from SSD doesn't work either)
- When booting with both drives the disk usage LED is permanently lit
- Issue appeared right at the start; I was unable to install Window until I removed the HDD.

Things I've tried or ruled out:

Inadequate or damaged PSU: 400 W on a new PSU should be enough. Power calcuators estimate a requirement of ~175 W with 2 HDDs

Cable / connector issues: Tried different cables (data and power) and different slots, no effect.

Unfortunately I can't rule out a broken HDD (no PC or external case available) but it should be working. I'm waiting for another 2TB drive to arrive and expect to run into the same problem with it.

I'm not entirely sure about BIOS settings. I've seen various suggestions telling people to toggle settings relating, for example, to secure boot but am uncertain how to translate them to my particular BIOS. I did try disabling "CSM support" (enabled by default) and fast boot is disabled.

Any ideas and suggestions would be welcome Thank you in advance!

----

Solution (and things tried to get there)

A summary of everything done to fix this issue. In short: The problem was caused by "left-over" partitions, including an MBR. These needed to be removed using the HDD-vendor's management tool to erase the drive.

1) If you haven't already, try booting without the suspect HDD to make sure it's the drive that's at fault

2) Try connecting the drive to different SATA slots or using a different cable. You might check the same with the power.

3) Try to "hot-swap" your drive after booting up into your OS (I'm assuming windows) (See notes below if you're not familliar with hot-swapping)

4) The drive should appear in My Computer, if it has been partitioned, or in the disk manager even if it has not. You can try formatting the partitions or deleting them and reallocating the space in the disk manager. (Note: Didn't work in my case. Disk manager was inaccessible with the drive connected.)

5) If the previous didn't work or you skipped it, try the drive vendor's disk management tool (you can probably find it in their support section). This tool should be able to erase the partitioning. You can also try searching for a "low level format" tool and run it on the drive. (Note: The HDD LLF tool did not work for me, the WD tool did) In either case any data on the drive will be lost, so be sure to select the correct drive.

6) Once the partitions have been erased, the drive should appear as an unallocated volume in the windows disk manager. From here you can repartition it and finally use it.

Some general advice: With the 'broken' HDD attached many applications dealing with hard drives or disk space tended to freeze up trying to access the drive. This includes the WD-tool I used to fix the issue. It helped to occasionally detach the drive so everything would run smoothly again. I even did this while setting up the WD tool to do the erase: Starting the tool, then connecting the drive so it so the tool would see it, and disconnect it again to click through the options.

On hot-swapping:
I had never heard of this, maybe you haven't either. Basically you're connecting your SATA drive while the computer is running. Before you try this you should check your mainboard manual to see if this is supported and how the BIOS should be configured. When you're ready, connect the drive to power, but don't connect the data cable. Boot up and only then connect the data cable. It should "pop up" much like a USB drive would, and you can plug/unplug the data cable any time.

I hope this helps you, but please note that other problems with a drive can apparently have similar symptoms. (E.g. a defective drive or power supply issues) Good luck!

 

[Barty1884]

Is there an OS installed on the HDD? If so, you may be running into boot conflicts between the two drives.

 

[DRagor]

Generally, if the HDD is empty (no partitions), it should have zero effect on the system ability to boot to Windows. Unless there is hardware problem with either HDD, motherboard SATA slot or the SATA/power cable. First thing to do would be to use different SATA port and different SATA cable. If the problem persists, unplug SSD and try booting with HDD alone - in this case you should get BIOS message that there is no system on disk, if you get the same stall instead I would assume HDD is not working.

 

[Gene Razak]

Thank you both for your replies. It really should have occurred to me before, but I've tested the HDD by itself now. Booting with nothing else attached results in the "missing operating system" message. I also tried booting from my Windows installer USB, which failed in the same way as before when both drives were attached. (The installer stalls with a blank blue screen. If opened a command prompt would show a message about "insufficient system resources"). I also noticed that the HDD does not appear in the boot device menu for manual selection during start-up.

So the HDD shouldn't be mistaken for an OS. Whether it's unpartitioned or has a (presumably empty) partition of some sort I cannot tell. I think the HDD had been used in a server before, if that makes any difference.

 

[ElectrO_90]

If you have Hot-Swappable turned on in your bios, you can power it all up without the sata cable plugged into the HDD.
When windows is booted up, you can plug the SATA into the hard disk.
Sata was designed to be hot-swappable. AHCI has to be ON in your bios.

 

[DRagor]

Thank you both for your replies. It really should have occurred to me before, but I've tested the HDD by itself now. Booting with nothing else attached results in the "missing operating system" message. I also tried booting from my Windows installer USB, which failed in the same way as before when both drives were attached. (The installer stalls with a blank blue screen. If opened a command prompt would show a message about "insufficient system resources"). I also noticed that the HDD does not appear in the boot device menu for manual selection during start-up.

So the HDD shouldn't be mistaken for an OS. Whether it's unpartitioned or has a (presumably empty) partition of some sort I cannot tell. I think the HDD had been used in a server before, if that makes any difference.

Hmm, that's strange. It looks like HDD is fine - which would mean the problem is either in some BIOS settings creating conflict with 2 drives attached, or it is motherboard hardware problem. Have you checked other SATA ports on motherboard?

 

[Gene Razak]

As before, thank you all for taking the time to help me out. There have been some developments.

First off, I have already tried different SATA-ports on the board as well as different data cables as well as different power slots and power cables. To no avail, sadly. Or perhaps fortunately, since returning defective is always such a hassle.

The new HDD has arrived and it worked straight away. BIOS recognised it, Windows disk manager partitioned it and it is now acccessible and (apparently) useable in Windows. It's a 2 TB Toshiba HDD, also used. It came without partitions. So that seems to rule out BIOS / mainboard issues. Even with another HDD installed the original HDD will still cause the same problems.

The hot-plug suggestion was very useful though. I didn't even know about this and had to recheck the MB-manual before noticing it. When I connect the HDD to the fully booted system, this happens:

1) HDD LED permanently lit (as before, but PC remains responsive)
2) Three unpartitioned "Local drives" show up in "My / This computer"
3) The disk manager will not start properly (doesn't show any drives / volumes / partitions
4) Windows notices two unformatted partitions and asks to format them
5) immediate recovery from all "symptoms" when the drive is disconnected

After some poking around I decided to format the first two partitions (100 MB and 910 GB). This should account for the storage capacity of the 1 TB drive, unless the third partition is very small. This seems to have worked: they show up as regular NTFS partitions.

The third partition will not budge, however. If I select "properties", "format" or similar options Windows will show the loading icon but never actually dispaly any dialogues.
When the disk manager is opened it stays blank, saying "Connecting to the service for virtual hard drives" (my rough translation). If I open the manager before connnecting and try to refresh it to show the new drive it will just display the "loading" cursor indefinitely.

So this is the current state of affairs:
- The computer will not boot with the HDD attached.
- The first two partitions have been formatted and seem to be working normally
- The third cannot be accessed or manipulated in any way (properties, format dialogues etc. will not show up, disk manager does not work)
- HDD light is permanently lit when the HDD is connected.
- Disconnecting the drive "fixes" all of this

So somehow I need to get rid of that mystery partition. Again, that drive originally came from somebody's server, so maybe that's why the partitions are in this strange setup. The drive was tested before I got it, but perhaps the partioning wasn't cleaned up beforehand.

Again, thank you, everyone. And even if it ultimately doesn't fix anything, learning about SATA hot-swapping was interesting in its own right.

 

[ElectrO_90]

OK, there are 2 things I recommend.
1 - Download Hard Disk Sentinel and run it - it will monitor your hard disks and it helps warn you that you have a failing hard disk.
2 - Download Low Level Format tool. This will wipe the ENTIRE drive no matter what is on it. Make sure you select the correct drive, then it confirms it with you, then it will LLF the drive. This will take a very long time, but it may help you with the drive.

Since you understand how to do some research, check out the LLF tool, it's great!

Also, I am pleased my Hot swappable trick helped. Not many people try this, and they should (i've also never seen anyone recommend doing it on this forum for problem HDDs).

 

[DRagor]

The third partition will not budge, however. If I select "properties", "format" or similar options Windows will show the loading icon but never actually dispaly any dialogues.

This means that drive previously had Windows on it. That 3rd partition you can't do anything is actually boot partition of that system, most likely became corrupt (due to system removal from other partitions) and is most likely cause it will not let you boot your system. The above advice about low level format is one approach to fix it, the other would be to re-partition the drive (creating one big partition). Either way, once the corrupt info is erased from that drive, it should no longer stop you from booting. Or at least I hope so 😉

 

[Paperdoc]

Some of the ways suggested for "cleaning" the 1 TB faulty unit depends on running under Windows, which means you have to boot into Windows with the faulty drive attached, which you cannot do. You might be able to skirt that by using the "Hot Swap" idea to get going, and THEN connect the troubled drive.

There's another way, too. The troubled drive is by WD. You can go to their website and download their disk diagnostic utility package, Data Lifeguard for DOS, here:

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=1211&s=#dlgdos

Be sure to get the "for DOS" version, because you can boot and run from a medium (the instructions tell you how to use with a bootable USB drive) without having ANY other bootable HDD or SSD in your system. You do need to be able to set your BIOS to boot from the selected storage device.

Before doing this, I recommend you DISconnect ALL storage drives except the troubled one and the USB bootable unit. The operation below destroys all data on whatever unit it works on and no others, BUT you want to be SURE you run it only on the troubled drive.

When you boot this way it loads a mini-DOS OS into RAM and lets you run the diagnostics suite from the USB drive. Be SURE to specify which drive it is to work on properly. It can do some tests of the unit to tell you if it has a serious hardware problem or not. It has a few tools to do repair work or something. Some of these tools DO destroy some or all data on the target drive, so be careful.

I suggest using the Zero Fill tool. This WILL destroy all data and structures on the troubled drive and leave it completely empty and full of zeroes everywhere. It takes a long time to do the job because it must write and test every Sector of the drive, so be patient. In doing its wipe job, it triggers a "self-healing" tool inside the HDD itself that finds any weak Sectors and replaces them with known-good ones from a stock of spares. When it finishes, the HDD appears to be completely empty AND free of ANY faulty Sectors. The only exception to this is if the HDD already had had a lot of such replacements done before and the stock of known-good spares was all used up. In that case, there's no way to fix it.

If this completes without errors you can shut down, remove the USB bootable stick, re-connect all your SSD and HDD units, and boot. It should boot cleanly, and that 1 TB unit should NOT show up in My Computer. But it WILL show up in Disk Management at lower right as a HDD with all Unallocated Space. You can RIGHT-click on that and choose to Create a New Simple Volume, which will Partition and Format the drive. One change to make in its default settings for this operation: since you do not want to BOOT from this unit, its Partition does not need to be bootable.

 

[Gene Razak]

It's finally working. I tried the (or a?) HDD Low Level Format tool but it, too, stalled when trying to access the drive. After that I did in fact come across the WD tool (the windows version), which managed to execute a ("quick") erase. This was enough to remove the partitioning, after which the windows disk manager was immediately able to allocate and format the drive space normally.

Thank you all for helping to figure this out. Since I can only pick one best answer I'll award it to ElectrO_90, who managed the biggest "leaps" on this issue. I'll also update my original question with a summary so that - hopefully - anyone else with this issue has an easier time through it.

 

[Paperdoc]

Good to hear of your success, and thanks for the details.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Thanks Gene, did you try hard disk sentinel?
I won't run a computer without it, as it does help monitor the drives. If you did install it, what does it say about your WD drive? Does it show it was erroring and it's getting worse?

 

[Gene Razak]

I didn't try hd sentinel, actually. The WD tool also seem to do health monitoring, has its own test function and reported all drives as "healthy", which will do for now. Most of my drives are made by Western Digital anyway, not that the tool cares. It was good advice though, and I'll probably do some proper testing once I introduce my new computer to my ageing array of external drives.