SATA ports failure?

theblindguy

Distinguished
Dec 30, 2011
6
0
18,510
Howdy, I'm stumped here. I changed to sata HDD and sata dvd drive about 6 months ago. Yeah I know, what took so long right? I'm using the asus A8N-sli-premiun MOBO. All i did was take out the IDE drives and plug in the new sata drives. installed windows and it was working flawlessly for 6 months until last week when i turned it on and got a prompt to load a system disk. I noticed in the bios that neither the sata HDD or sata dvd drive was recognized. I do still have another IDE dvd drive hooked up and it was recognized. I tried changing the sata ports they were plugged into. I went from port 1 and 2 to using 3 and 4. It still wouldnt boot. I unplugged both sata devices and hook up an old IDE HDD and it booted and has worked fine. so i decided to plug in the sata dvd. It loaded windows ok but froze after it finished loading. If i plug in the sata HDD and not the sata dvd it will not load windows and just promt for a system disk. so i dont think the sata drives are the issue. what are the odds of both of them going bad at the same time? slim i would think. also cleared the cmos and checked the bios for anything i could have missed. not sure what. i didnt have to change anything in the bios to run the sata devices in the beginning. I suppose i could get a sata pci card to run my sata devices. Im interested in any ideas you might have. Thanks in advance for any advise you might have.
 

majorminor

Honorable
Sep 16, 2012
1
0
10,510
The exact same thing happened to me. Same board also. I suspect that the capacitors on the motherboard dried out and failed on some power line used for the SATA analog power supply to the IO chip. I have not tried replacing all the caps yet to try bringing it back to life, but that is an extremely common failure in electronics of ALL types. If you look through an electronic parts catalog you will find that the electrolytic caps used in these devices are rated for 1000 to maybe 3000 hours of lifetime. Larger sized (physical size) parts generally have a longer lifetime, and the smaller ones (like on the motherboard) have shorter ones. Built in obsolesence, requiring motherboard replacement even if the CPU has a design lifetime of 10 years instead of 6 months.