Question Secondary hard drive suddenly went missing ?

[hc5000]

Hey all, I'm Chris, long time reader, first time posting. So heres the deal....
About this time last year I picked up a cheap Dell Optiplex 9010 for a xmas gift for my son. Before he recieved it, I cloned the HDD it came with over to a new SSD, and wiped the HDD and moved it down the line to serve as a secondary storage drive, and I bumped the ram up from 8gb to 16gb. No issues with any of that. It actually far exceeded my expections..

Fast forward to his birthday in May when I added a Gigabyte GTX 1050ti GPU, a Coolermaster CPU Cooler and case swapped into a Coolermaster Case. All went well, and everything was still running perfect.

Fast Forward again to late Oct. - early Nov. when one day he fired it up as normal but music wont play, games arent launching, etc.. everything on the secondary HDD. The disk wasn't showing up anywhere in windows, its like it vanished. Everything on the SSD was running great as normal. I pulled the HDD that was no longer being detected and plugged it into my dock then into my laptop and its reading it fine, everything I expected to see on it was there, no issues.. I plugged the dock into my Desktop, same thing, read the drive just fine, accessed everything, no problem.. Plug it into his Dell via the dock. nothing...... not there at all.. pull it from the dock and plug it in via its origional sata port followed by the remaining 2 available sata ports and nothing..

Ive been in and out of the bios and everything looks good to me, but obviously I'm missing something.... The one thing I havent tried was a different drive in his Dell, I just wanted to see if anyone has any suggestions or could maybe shed some light before I pull a drive from my pc to test on his.

Thanks very much in advance.
Chris

 

[lvt]

Do you mean that you can see the HDD in the Bios but not in Windows?

 

[hc5000]

Do you mean that you can see the HDD in the Bios but not in Windows?

No, sorrry I should have specified. the HDD doesn't show up anywhere, including the BIOS. my mention of the BIOS was in terms of all 4 sata ports are turned on, and any other settings regaurding storage drives seemed to be correct. to the best of my knowledge anyways. But no the HDD isn't being detected anywhere within that dell pc.

 

[lvt]

No, sorrry I should have specified. the HDD doesn't show up anywhere, including the BIOS. my mention of the BIOS was in terms of all 4 sata ports are turned on, and any other settings regaurding storage drives seemed to be correct. to the best of my knowledge anyways. But no the HDD isn't being detected anywhere within that dell pc.

Did you check SATA or power cable?

You can do both things by testing with another HDD.

 

[hc5000]

Did you check SATA or power cable?

You can do both things by testing with another HDD.

I did try several different sets of cables when I tried the drive on the additional sata ports. and as well as connecting the drive via usb dock with no successful detection

 

[lvt]

I did try several different sets of cables when I tried the drive on the additional sata ports. and as well as connecting the drive via usb dock with no successful detection

So given that :

1. The HDD works fine in your computer (verified).
2. All cables are good (assumed).
3. BIOS is cleared and set to default setting (with SATA enabled).

You should use another HDD to test with his computer, as you said above.

 

[lvt]

And when a HDD doesn't show up in the Bios, you should also think about a power issue.

Can you hear the HDD spins when you turn the computer on? If you hear nothing, there might be an issue with the 12V, if the HDD spins but doesn't show up, it could be a faulty 5V line...

 

[hc5000]

And when a HDD doesn't show up in the Bios, you should also think about a power issue.

Can you hear the HDD spins when you turn the computer on? If you hear nothing, there might be an issue with the 12V, if the HDD spins but doesn't show up, it could be a faulty 5V line...

I'm honestly not sure, that's something I'll have to look into tomorrow, but it kinda falls inline with another issue that has turned up since I first posted this. long story short its a GPU issue, but I think its being caused by a power issue as well.

I see now that I didn't mention in the origional post that in May at the time I added the GPU and swapped the cpu cooler I also replaced the origional psu with a AresGame 650watt psu. I should have tons of power for what the pc requires, but I'm wondering if the Mobo isn't delivering it properly at this point.

I came across a brand new Asus P8H61-M LX3 PLUS R2.0 Motherboard today and grabbed it for $20,00 Tomorrow I'm going to strip the pc down and swap the motherboard and see where that leaves me.

Thanks a ton for the replies! really appreciate any help I can get with these things!