What's needs to be replaced--Motherboard or HDD?

[russianheman]

Hello, I built a new system with a seagate barracuda SATA HDD and ASRock A780LM motherboard. After a few weeks of working beautifully, my primary HDD crashed. BIOS wouldn't recognize it. So I returned it just fine. The replacement drive came and BIOS acknowledged the drive on the first boot. I attempted to install Windows but Windows did not detect the drive. It did, however, detect my secondary drive. I rebooted. Then all of the sudden on the first reboot, BIOS no longer detected the new drive! I could see the secondary drive fine though. Same problem twice in a row! Do I need to replace my HDD again although BIOS detects my other drive? Or is the problem somehow connected to the motherboard--corrupting my HDD firmware or a failed BIOS chip?

 

[treefrog07]

It is unusual for two failed HDDs, but it does happen. Since the board finds your other HDD, it is not likely the board is bad.

Have you tried connecting the HDD to another SATA connection? Each of the free connectors?

You may want to flash your BIOS to the latest version, here, 1/2 way down the page.

 

[Paperdoc]

You can do a test easily. you KNOW the port your "secondary drive" is connected to works, and its data and power connections. Temporarily transfer the connectors from the secondary hard drive to the new one, then boot up. Does the system detect the new drive properly this way? If it does, the dive is OK and you have a problem either in the data cable, the power supply cable, or the mobo port that were ORIGINALLY connected to the new drive. If it does not work the new drive is faulty.

 

[russianheman]

but is it possible that the motherboard is corrupting the HDD firmware, causing the drive to fail?

 

[Paperdoc]

I suppose that might be possible, although it is more likely something like an overload on a HDD circuit board, and not a corruption of the drive's firmware. Anyway, I think that is very unlikely. Try the swap test I suggested to see if the new drive actually works that way.If is does not, I'd still be inclined to agree with treefrog07 - 2 bad drives is more likely than some of the other things.