Question SSD not being recognized by motherboard SATA ports?

[Ol' Reliable Bigfoot]

I've been helping my friend recently with their PC, and they recently realized their secondary SSD (Samsung 870 EVO 1tb) is not being recognized by Windows. They have another SSD, an NVME, which has Windows installed on it and it is working fine. I looked at the SSD and saw that it was also not being recognized by the BIOS. It was working fine and with no issues prior to this and now it seems to just not be detectable on their PC. I have taken the SSD out of their computer and tried it in mine and the drive is connected and recognized with no issues, it passed a scan test and showed to be in perfect working order, but when I go back to their computer it still doesn't recognize the drive. I have tried the following in an attempt to get their computer to recognize the drive:

• Plugging the SATA cable into different ports on the motherboard
• Removing and reinserting the CMOS battery
• A different SATA cable in different ports
• Updating the BIOS
• Updating motherboard drivers
• A different SATA power cable to the SSD
• Enabling Hotplug in the bios
• Ensuring the BIOS drive setting was set to AHCI instead of RAID

I did get the drive to appear once for a second, but then it dissapeared upon restarting it and I have been unable to reproduce that result. I am at a loss and am unsure of what to do to get their computer to recognize this drive again. I am hoping someone on here may have some ideas. Also the system specs are as follows:

• Intel i5-11400
• MSI MAG B560 Torpedo ATX LGA 1200 Motherboard
• G. Skill Trident Z Neo 16 GB (2x8 GB) DDR4
• WD Black SN750 500GB M.2
• Samsung 870 EVO 1tb SSD (This is the one causing problems)
• ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1080
• EVGA GQ 650 Watt 80+ Gold Power Supply

Thank you for any help and assistance you can offer.

Edit: I had incorrectly stated the drive was an 860, I have corrected it to say the correct model, which is an 870 EVO.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

For the sake of relevance, what BIOS version are you currently on for the motherboard? If the storage controller's setting was on RAID and then set to AHCI, you might want to think about reinstalling the OS while the storage controller is set to AHCI, provided your friend's system does not have a RAID array to work with.

Which slot is the NVMe drive populating on the motherboard? As for the SATA SSD, which ports have you tried thus far? As a test, remove the discrete GPU, work with the iGPU and see if the SATA SSD shows up in BIOS.

 

[Ol' Reliable Bigfoot]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

For the sake of relevance, what BIOS version are you currently on for the motherboard? If the storage controller's setting was on RAID and then set to AHCI, you might want to think about reinstalling the OS while the storage controller is set to AHCI, provided your friend's system does not have a RAID array to work with.

Which slot is the NVMe drive populating on the motherboard? As for the SATA SSD, which ports have you tried thus far? As a test, remove the discrete GPU, work with the iGPU and see if the SATA SSD shows up in BIOS.

Thank you for the welcome, and I found that information today and also removed the GPU and tried running it with the iGPU as you had suggested and the system still failed to recognize the SSD. The BIOS version is E7D15IMS.A40, and the system has always been set to AHCI, I just double checked to make sure it hadn't been changed somehow. The NVMe drive is in the second M.2 slot, slot 2, on the motherboard. I have tried SATA ports 1,2,5, and 6. The result is the same with all of them. Today I attempted it with my SSD to see if it would detect that and it did not, however when I connected my 1tb HDD to the exact same connections as the SDD was previously connected to, it worked and recognized it without issue, so based on that the SATA ports appear to be in working order, they just cannot detect an SSD. The system will recognize the drive when connected to an external drive box that connects through a USB cable, but it fails to with SATA.