Second Hard Drive Not Detected by BIOS

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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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I just added a second hard drive to my computer — it's a drive that was my primary drive about 3 months ago until I replaced it with a newer one (this one's only half a year old). Anyways, rather than letting it go to waste, I added it back into the computer, but when it boots it's not recognized.

It's a Seagate, so in my desktop I have a 1TB Seagate and a 750GB Seagate hard drive, but only the 1TB is recognized. My electricity was discharged, I was grounded with an antistatic cable connected to my other computer with the power supply plugged in and in the "off" position. Any ideas?

I have my 1TB drive plugged into SATA 4 and this one in SATA 2. Does that matter?
 
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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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I found out that the problem was actually related to the SATA power cable. There are three power cables all linked together and I skipped the second and plugged the third into the hard drive, which I realized would not work unless the second one was plugged into a hard drive.
 
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ArtPog

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Glad to hear your problem was resolved although the solution sounds rather strange.

Ordinarily it doesn't make any difference which SATA power connector is used to supply power to a drive. Doesn't matter if it's the first connector or the third connector or the fifth connector in the chain - all the SATA power connectors emanating from the PSU are designed to provide appropriate power. There's no requirement that I'm aware of that the connections must be in consecutive order. At least that's been my experience.

Are you sure you weren't referring a change with the SATA data connectors? I note you stated the drives were connected to SATA connectors 2 & 4. Generally speaking (assuming you have two installed drives) the boot drive should be connected to the first SATA connector (designated SATA 0 or SATA 1) and the secondary drive to the second SATA connector (SATA 1 or SATA 2).
 
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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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The only difference between the first boot and the successful one in which it was recognized is that I had a different SATA power cable plugged in. When it booted to Linux I knew it was working then. But yes that solved my problems, strange it is, but it did. Prior to that I tried different SATA (not power) cables and different ports to no avail.
 
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fzabkar

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I don't understand why switching power cables worked, unless you were using a modular cable from a different PSU. Modular pinouts are not standardised.

Otherwise, the only other thought, which could not possibly apply in your case, is that some systems employ power sequencing whereby one drive needs to spin up before the next drive in the group is allowed to start. Pin #11 of the SATA power connector is used for staggered spinup.
 
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