possible motherboard SATA problem?

[Drendo]

I suspect my Asus Maximux Vi Hero's SATA controller might be going bad. Recently I moved my computer into a full tower case and added a custom water loop. Everything went fine until I noticed that none of my 4 hard drives are recognized by the BIOS anymore. Then two days later my SSD became extremely slow and laggy and Windows 7 blue screened every time I tried to start it. Now it is "locked" and I can't do a secure erase or access the drive, but it does show up in the BIOS. I have to live boot Ubuntu from a USB drive to even use the computer now. Yesterday I bought a brand new hard drive and it is not recognized by either the BIOS or a USB HDD dock.

The problem could also be the power supply. Maybe it surged on the SATA rail. It is also worth noting that my DVD drive also doesn't work. It just flashes the light when I try to open it. It shows an error when I try to open it from the operating system. I manually opened it but it wouldn't even try to read the DVD. It is really weird that all of my SATA devices are dead while everything else is working perfectly. I had no problems, then I moved everything to a bigger case and suddenly I have no working SATA devices...

 

[Karsten75]

happens all the time. You get a moving company from the Yellow pages, and the minimum-wage laborers that show up damage your precious Michelangelo statue...

 

[Drendo]

I was careful (as always) moving the hard drives and I really don't think I damaged them. Maybe a static electrical spark damaged something. It is too much for it to be a coincidence for 4 hard drives, a solid state drive, and a DVD drive to all fail at the exact same time when I moved them to a new case.

I really want to know if everyone thinks the damage was caused by the motherboard, power supply, or something else. I'm thinking of upgrading to a new Z97 if that will solve my problems.

 

[Karsten75]

what we think is really immaterial. We have no idea. You can buy a PSU tester to check if the PSU emits the correct voltages on all the outlets.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899705003

CPU and motherboard generally can't be tested except by swapping them into a "known good" equivalent rig.Even then you run the risk that whatever damage they cause may be transferred to the good rig.

If you have diagnostic LEDs on your motherboard, they may give a clue if the POST sequence has issues.

 

[Avier]

I can second what Karsten75 said about the LEDs. I do believe every motherboard from the Maximus VI line has a debug screen. Just crack open your motherboard's manual to find out what it's telling you.
If I were you, I's try attaching your sATA devices to another computer via a sATA --> USB cable or something, if they show up healthy, it's probably something up with your motherboard.

 

[Drendo]

Thanks for trying to help. I was hoping someone would have heard of something similar happening. The motherboard shows the voltages in the "Monitoring" section and they look good. I also have a Unitek USB 3.0 hard drive dock and I noticed that none of the hard drives make any noise or vibrations whatsoever when I plug them in, except for my backup hard drive that I had left in the dock with the power turned off. My best guess is that a voltage spike burned up all of the motors in the drives and damaged (or destroyed) my SSD. I still have hope for the SSD if I can find a way to get it unlocked so I can do a secure erase and reformat it. At least it shows up in the BIOS.

The reason I am so concerned about this is because I want to know what caused it so I can prevent it from happening again in the future. I will have lost roughly $1,000 between the cost of ordering new hard drives and losing all the old drives I just bought 6 months ago.