- Jul 31, 2016
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Okay, if someone has a fix to this I'm all ears, but after a good deal of research I'm pretty sure that i'm just going to have to go without four of my SATA ports. I'm posting this not so much because I want help restoring them (though, again, huge bonus if it's possible), but rather I just want to narrow down what I did that fried them. For this purpose, I'm going to go into excruciating detail about what I did. TL;DR at the bottom.
Here's the story.
I've been using my machine for about a solid year now, and it's worked wonderfully. Mother boards is a Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1150. That entire time I've had an SSD with my OS and most important stuff in SATA 0, a 1TB HDD with all my media and lower-priority programs in SATA 1, and a Blu-Ray/DVD+R drive in SATA 2. Well, this entire time I've had a pile of old HDDs sitting around in a desk drawer from old machines that either belonged to me or family members. Nothing important on any of them, and they were presumably not much better than paper weights, but a couple of nights ago I got bored and decided to see if any of them were actually work anything. One of the 1 TB ones I even considered adding to my machine, though I was a little wary because it had a history of hardware malfunction (it was originally bought as an external HDD, but it died and I just reformatted it and used it as an internal on my last PC up until it started acting up, but by that point I was about to build my current one so I just stuck it in the drawer and forgot about it). This particular HDD was the main reason I was doing this, as it still had some pictures and such I had never been able to salvage. They weren't particularly important, but I wanted to see if I could pull them off to test my IT skills.
Anyway, on my last machine I had always hotswapped my internal drives, so I figured that would be a pretty solid way to figure out which ones were even operational and which weren't. I play with them a bit, most of them don't even show up, the ones that do freeze up my machine when I try to access them. I assume they're trash and forget about them again.
On a whim, though, last night I got the idea that maybe I could run a CHKDSK on the 1 TB, which was one of the two that showed up but froze things up when I tried to read it. Wondering if Hotswapping might have been part of the problem I turn my current machine off, plug in the HDD, turn it on, and it freezes up. Sits on the Windows logo for two hours before I throw in the towel and decide it's probably just throwing a fit trying to read a bad HDD again. Power off, unplug the bad HDD, power back on. I decided to try hotswapping it again, thinking that maybe if I try to run the CHKDSK through right clicking the drive it might not freeze up. Worst case scenario I just power off again, right? I right click, machine freezes up, I power off.
I power back up again, and machine freezes. Duh, can't power up with the bad HDD in. Obvious. Dumb mistake. Power back down, Unplug the SATA.
Power back up, intending to hotplug it again, and run the chkdsk from the command prompt. By this point I'm 99% sure that I'm wasting my time, but I'm bored and feel like learning something. But this time the HDD doesn't show up in This PC.
"Okay," I think, "maybe it's just a new kind of broken. Or maybe the problem freezing it up is the SATA port, not the HDD." So I unplug it, and try the other three available SATA ports. No dice. I then decide to unplug my DVD drive, because I /know/ that one works fine. I that drive all the time. Hotplug the HDD, no dice. Welp, I give up. Game over, I lose. HDD is officially a lost cause. I unplug it and plug the DVD drive back in. And it doesn't show up.
I restart, thinking that maybe it just doesn't like hotswapping. Still nothing.
Off, plug into the next SATA port, on, check. Rinse, lather, repeat until I deduce that all four SATA ports are no longer working with the disk drive, which does still have power because it'll still eject CDs.
Off, unplug the good HDD from SATA 1, plug in disc drive, on, disc drive is there and working fine. Also tested a different SATA cable, showing that the cable wasn't the problem.
So I'm pretty sure that SATA 2-5 are shot now.
Reset my BIOS. Noticed that hotplugging was actually disabled for all my ports, so not even sure why broken HDD was showing up in the first place, but after the BIOS reset all four ports are still not working.
TL;DR I was hotswapping broken harddrives trying to salvage them, on SATA ports with the Hotplugging option disabled, and somewhere along the line I'm pretty sure I broke my SATA ports.
Now, if anyone has any crazy advice for how to fix the ports without just buying a new Motherboard, awesome. But I'm really not expecting that kind of good news. Again, what I /do/ want, if possible, is a clear explanation of /how/ I broke it.
Theory 1: the Bad HDD ruined everything it touched. While possible, I'd like to know /how/. I'm pretty sure the problem is hardware, not software, so is there a short in it that could have somehow traveled to the SATA port and fried it? I didn't think a bad HDD could damage a motherboard like that. Or did the Motherboard kick in some kind of "This is bad, let's block it out so that it can't hurt us" move that resetting the BIOS didn't stop?
Theory 2: Hotplugging on Hotplugging disabled SATA ports is damaging. Again, this could be my naivety, but I thought that worst case scenario whatever you plugged in just didn't read until you restart. I didn't think that you could actually fry a SATA port by doing that. And for that matter, if hotplugging was disabled, how did the HDD show up the first time?
Theory 3: Despite how careful I was I managed to poke part of the motherboard with just enough static to fry four SATA ports and the fact that everything else still works fine is an act of great fortune to be rejoiced. That's an oddly specific thing to happen, and I've never fried anything via static before because I'm pretty careful, but I'm not ruling it out.
Theory 4: Totally coincidental timing, they would have given out without my meddling anyway. I find this ridiculously unlikely, but not /totally/ impossible.
Thoughts? Explanations? Questions seeking clarification?
Bonus points for finding a way to restore those four SATA ports.
More Bonus points for finding a way to salvage files from the obviously lost cause HDD.
Here's the story.
I've been using my machine for about a solid year now, and it's worked wonderfully. Mother boards is a Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1150. That entire time I've had an SSD with my OS and most important stuff in SATA 0, a 1TB HDD with all my media and lower-priority programs in SATA 1, and a Blu-Ray/DVD+R drive in SATA 2. Well, this entire time I've had a pile of old HDDs sitting around in a desk drawer from old machines that either belonged to me or family members. Nothing important on any of them, and they were presumably not much better than paper weights, but a couple of nights ago I got bored and decided to see if any of them were actually work anything. One of the 1 TB ones I even considered adding to my machine, though I was a little wary because it had a history of hardware malfunction (it was originally bought as an external HDD, but it died and I just reformatted it and used it as an internal on my last PC up until it started acting up, but by that point I was about to build my current one so I just stuck it in the drawer and forgot about it). This particular HDD was the main reason I was doing this, as it still had some pictures and such I had never been able to salvage. They weren't particularly important, but I wanted to see if I could pull them off to test my IT skills.
Anyway, on my last machine I had always hotswapped my internal drives, so I figured that would be a pretty solid way to figure out which ones were even operational and which weren't. I play with them a bit, most of them don't even show up, the ones that do freeze up my machine when I try to access them. I assume they're trash and forget about them again.
On a whim, though, last night I got the idea that maybe I could run a CHKDSK on the 1 TB, which was one of the two that showed up but froze things up when I tried to read it. Wondering if Hotswapping might have been part of the problem I turn my current machine off, plug in the HDD, turn it on, and it freezes up. Sits on the Windows logo for two hours before I throw in the towel and decide it's probably just throwing a fit trying to read a bad HDD again. Power off, unplug the bad HDD, power back on. I decided to try hotswapping it again, thinking that maybe if I try to run the CHKDSK through right clicking the drive it might not freeze up. Worst case scenario I just power off again, right? I right click, machine freezes up, I power off.
I power back up again, and machine freezes. Duh, can't power up with the bad HDD in. Obvious. Dumb mistake. Power back down, Unplug the SATA.
Power back up, intending to hotplug it again, and run the chkdsk from the command prompt. By this point I'm 99% sure that I'm wasting my time, but I'm bored and feel like learning something. But this time the HDD doesn't show up in This PC.
"Okay," I think, "maybe it's just a new kind of broken. Or maybe the problem freezing it up is the SATA port, not the HDD." So I unplug it, and try the other three available SATA ports. No dice. I then decide to unplug my DVD drive, because I /know/ that one works fine. I that drive all the time. Hotplug the HDD, no dice. Welp, I give up. Game over, I lose. HDD is officially a lost cause. I unplug it and plug the DVD drive back in. And it doesn't show up.
I restart, thinking that maybe it just doesn't like hotswapping. Still nothing.
Off, plug into the next SATA port, on, check. Rinse, lather, repeat until I deduce that all four SATA ports are no longer working with the disk drive, which does still have power because it'll still eject CDs.
Off, unplug the good HDD from SATA 1, plug in disc drive, on, disc drive is there and working fine. Also tested a different SATA cable, showing that the cable wasn't the problem.
So I'm pretty sure that SATA 2-5 are shot now.
Reset my BIOS. Noticed that hotplugging was actually disabled for all my ports, so not even sure why broken HDD was showing up in the first place, but after the BIOS reset all four ports are still not working.
TL;DR I was hotswapping broken harddrives trying to salvage them, on SATA ports with the Hotplugging option disabled, and somewhere along the line I'm pretty sure I broke my SATA ports.
Now, if anyone has any crazy advice for how to fix the ports without just buying a new Motherboard, awesome. But I'm really not expecting that kind of good news. Again, what I /do/ want, if possible, is a clear explanation of /how/ I broke it.
Theory 1: the Bad HDD ruined everything it touched. While possible, I'd like to know /how/. I'm pretty sure the problem is hardware, not software, so is there a short in it that could have somehow traveled to the SATA port and fried it? I didn't think a bad HDD could damage a motherboard like that. Or did the Motherboard kick in some kind of "This is bad, let's block it out so that it can't hurt us" move that resetting the BIOS didn't stop?
Theory 2: Hotplugging on Hotplugging disabled SATA ports is damaging. Again, this could be my naivety, but I thought that worst case scenario whatever you plugged in just didn't read until you restart. I didn't think that you could actually fry a SATA port by doing that. And for that matter, if hotplugging was disabled, how did the HDD show up the first time?
Theory 3: Despite how careful I was I managed to poke part of the motherboard with just enough static to fry four SATA ports and the fact that everything else still works fine is an act of great fortune to be rejoiced. That's an oddly specific thing to happen, and I've never fried anything via static before because I'm pretty careful, but I'm not ruling it out.
Theory 4: Totally coincidental timing, they would have given out without my meddling anyway. I find this ridiculously unlikely, but not /totally/ impossible.
Thoughts? Explanations? Questions seeking clarification?
Bonus points for finding a way to restore those four SATA ports.
More Bonus points for finding a way to salvage files from the obviously lost cause HDD.
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