Hard drive is detected, then isn't detected

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
Hello,

Recently, my hard drive has not been detected by my computer. I find that putting the SATA cable into another slot allows the BIOS to detect it, but only enough for the Windows logo to show up with the loading icon; after that, I get a blue screen with the frowny face, computer restarts, then it goes to BIOS and the hard drive does not spin up. I was able to reset the PC; however, when I went to the Edge browser after resetting to download another browser (because Edge sucks lol), the hard drive stopped reading, the computer froze, I was met with a blue screen, and it did the same thing it has been doing (BIOS not detecting the hard drive). I find that every time I switch from one SATA port to the other, it is detected at first, then the computer blue screen restarts and the hard drive is once again not detected.

So something is obviously defective in my system. I just want to know what so that I don't spend money on a hard drive to find out that wasn't the problem, or same thing with a new motherboard.

I will also add that the hard drive is a refurbished hard drive and that HDTune did show that it had a failed reallocated sector count. The hard drive operated at normal speed before this started occurring (I say this because another hard drive I owned before this one had the same reallocated sector count failure, but it showed signs of failure with frequent freezes and slow downs; this one hasn't done this).

Thanks! Any help is appreciated.
 
Solution
You could test the motherboard by setting BIOS to boot from the CD drive or a USB stick then put a bootable Linux system on either.

If that works, the problem is with the hard disk.
Depending on your version of Windows, if it's Seven or older, power up and press the Function 8 key to start up in Safe Mode then press the Windows key and R together to type
cmd
into the Run box and bring up a Command form. At the prompt, type
chkdsk /r
to run Checkdisk. The /r switch tells the system to try fixing any disk errors it finds.

When that completes, now would be a good time to get your personal data out of there to a place of safety.
 

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
Hi Saga Lout,

This computer has actually nothing of value to me on it. I use Google Drive to back up my important data and use spotify for my music. This machine is a gaming machine for the most part, and steam does of course have their steam cloud feature for backing up game saves.

As far as your answer goes, I'm sorry to say that I'm not sure how that could help me. If the hard drive stops being read anyway, how would chkdsk help? It actually did chkdsk a couple of days ago on its own w/o user input and came up clean.

So the main question I still have is: would this be a hard drive error or motherboard error? As I've said, HDTune does show that the reallocated sector count failed.

Thanks,

Drew
 

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
So after doing what you said, the system booted just fine into the bootable Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS live usb flash drive that I made. Is there any way I can test the sata ports to see if they are the culprit before I spend money on another hard drive? I used both my SATA cables but got the same result with each one on all 4 SATA ports. I feel the need to reiterate that I was able to reset the PC just fine before the hard drive stopped reading and then the blue screen. I am wondering how the hard drive worked perfectly during the reset, then stopped working right after.

If Saga Lout or anyone else could help me with this, that would be much appreciated. Thank you!
 

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
Unable to access "2.0 TB Volume"
Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/ubuntu/C49A9D9B9A9D8B16: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999" "/dev/sda2" "/media/ubuntu/C49A9D9B9A9D8B16"' exited with non-zero exit status 14: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Operation not permitted
The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown
Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume
read-only with the 'ro' mount option.

Above is the error message I get when trying to access my hard drive via the Ubuntu file explorer. Does this for sure mean the hard drive is the culprit?
 

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
Saga Lout,

As this is a gaming PC, the files I lost were mostly installer packages. All of my important documents are backed up on my Google Drive.

Just as a little update, I did buy a Seagate Firecuda 2TB yesterday, as we seemed to have ruled out the motherboard as the problem. I will update once again when I have installed Windows 10 again on the Firecuda.

If the computer works just fine with the hard drive I just bought, I will pick your last message as the solution; if I am still having issues, I will let you and everyone else reading this forum know.

Thanks,

Drew
 

dhambel

Estimable
Dec 9, 2015
7
0
4,510
To the rest of the community having the same issue I did:

I found out that the PCB on the hard drive went bad. The hard drive would spin up, but the interface board would not connect to the motherboard (PCB and interface board are the same thing I believe). So if your hard drive spins up just fine, but the BIOS does not show it, you could have a bad hard drive with the aforementioned issue. That or your MOBO has gone bad, which you will hope that it is the former rather than the latter, as replacing a MOBO is definitely a pain. To test if it is a MOBO issue, use the Ubuntu Live USB option (download ubuntu and universal usb installer, they are free, google them) and you will need a USB to do that. Saga Lout recommended this to me, and I picked it as the best solution.

Thanks Saga Lout, and I hope that everyone's issues get fixed.