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I have an SSD for booting/Windows 10 and a HDD for storage. Sometimes the HDD isnt connected/recognised by my PC, even though I can see/feel/hear that is has powered on. Switching power cables doesnt work and switching the SATA cables, chained together, only makes the PC think it has no boot device, despite the SDD being unchanged.
recent problem or always happened?
check the BIOS can see both drives and the SSD is set to boot from first.
how old is the HDD?
making any funny noises? and have you check the SMART values for any errors?
SDD is in the top row on my PC and is my boot deviced as confirmed by BIOS and Windows, HDD 1 is in the middle, HDD 2 is in the bot. Rows refer to SATA cables. HDD 1 was doing this same thing months ago, so I assumed it was broken and took it out and switched HDD 2 to the middle. HDD 1 was 10 years old at this point, HDD 2 is only 4 years old. Now HDD 2 is having the same issue, but switching it back to the bottom set of cables doesnt fix it, despite the bottom cables and that drive never having this issue until the switch.
The HDD doesnt appear in BIOS, but it does appear in Windows directly after boot, yet disappears less than a minute later, and even while its listed in Windows I cant do anything to it, like open it. Once gone it doesnt appear in disk manager either.
No noises beyong the usual, and I dont know what SMART values are sorry.
SMART is Self Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology and is use to predict hard drive failures. it’s good but no gospel.
if you can’t detect the drive, you won;t be able to get to the SMART values, bit that would also indicate that the drive is faulty. especially if BIOS can’t see it.
the location of the drives is not important or decisive in how the PC uses them, it can be controlled from BIOS, but the default boot device is the port labelled SATA0.
I’d be putting that drive into an external USB enclosure and seeing if that helps. you could always use it as a backup drive if it is detected.
but with drives being so cheap, why even try using a known unreliable unit.
Money is a bit tight, but at the same time it was working fine until I swapped SATA cables, and the issue it is having is the exact same as the older HDD I had but this one isnt that old. Its just maddening. Can you think of anything that could be going wrong? the fact that I can use it for the minute its available at boot surely means something. Also the location only refers to which set of power and SATA cables I was using.
I have tried 2 different SATA cables, it wasnt having this issue on the first one, but I switched it months ago and no its having this issue on both cables.
Either way its annoyed me too much Ive ordered a new HDD, might get knew power and sata cables too.
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