Question SATA ports not recognizing any disks at all.

bazinga313

Prominent
Jun 21, 2019
7
0
510
Hey there. first time poster here. I recently bought an ssd and two 3tb hdd's to replace my two older 500gb and 1tb hdd's. Well I plugged the new drives into the extra sata ports and they never show up into device manager, disk manager and not even in bios. I eventually got the ssd to recognize but I had to remove my 1tb and plug my ssd into that sata port. I did a disk clone to transfer my 500gb with windows to the ssd, so now I have my ssd with windows as my boot drive. Still the 3tb would not be recognized in the other sata ports. It seems that only sata ports 0 and 1 are working because I even plugged in the older drive into ports 2-6 and they weren't recognized either. I combed all through the bios to try and find if the sata ports where just disabled, but in the sata config section it just doesn't have a way to enable or disable. the only thing I can change is IDE/AHCI and I can enable hot swapping on each port and E-sata on each port. I tried to boot in IDE and that didn't work at all. I'm not sure if these ports are dead and I need to either get a pci sata card or just a new board all together. Also I have tried every thing I can think of that might be wrong like bad cables, loose connection, bad power connection, I even checked the drivers for the sata controllers, they where a little out of date so updated them but it didn't change anything.
The only thing I can think of checking is updating the bios, but not sure if I'm capable of doing it properly.
I was thinking of just getting an external hdd to transfer all the contents from the 1tb to and then transfer it all back to one of the 3tb hdd's. But of course I would love to be able to use the other 3tb and the 1tb hdd as well, giving me a total of 7.5tbs. How awesome would that be, am I right? LOL

By the way the board is a cheap Chinese intel x79 lga 2011 board because x79 boards are stupid expensive. I know, I know, the first thing everyone is going to say is just get a new board, but lets save that for the last resort. Its not a great board but I've had it for 2 or so years now and its been working great till now. I've honestly never had a problem with knock-off brands before. Maybe if I can upgrade to a better chip and board, possibly something with ddr4 then I will but until then I just want to solve this issue.
And thank you ahead of time for any help or tips.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
You've got too much going on at once.

Find ONE blank drive.
Put it in the lowest numbered SATA port, either 1 or 0.
Install the OS on it.

It works?
Good.

Now move that single drive to the next SATA port.
Does it boot up?

Repeat through all ports, to verify they all actually work.
 

bazinga313

Prominent
Jun 21, 2019
7
0
510
You've got too much going on at once.

Find ONE blank drive.
Put it in the lowest numbered SATA port, either 1 or 0.
Install the OS on it.

It works?
Good.

Now move that single drive to the next SATA port.
Does it boot up?

Repeat through all ports, to verify they all actually work.
Ok that's a good Idea. I'll try taking my ssd that has windows already installed on it and remove all other drives and try them in the other ports and look for a boot. Like I said ports 0 and 1 are for sure working because I have two drives in them now and it works fine. So I will try the others with just my one boot disk installed.
 

bazinga313

Prominent
Jun 21, 2019
7
0
510
You've got too much going on at once.

Find ONE blank drive.
Put it in the lowest numbered SATA port, either 1 or 0.
Install the OS on it.

It works?
Good.

Now move that single drive to the next SATA port.
Does it boot up?

Repeat through all ports, to verify they all actually work.

So I tried my boot disk on all of the other ports and the computer would not boot, just straight to bios.