BIOS won\'t recognize SATA Hard Drive

neophytexero

Honorable
Dec 13, 2012
1
0
10,510
Hi, I just replaced my motherboard and CPU and after all of that was said and done, booted up to find that my Western Digital hard drive is labeled as "Generic Storage Device" in the BIOS and the computer will not boot to it. Everything worked fine before the new hardware. Any ideas or insight to fix the issue will surely prevent my future torment.
 

with the mb replacment boot into safe mode of the os that installed and install the mb chipset drivers. once there installed reboot and see that the drive comes up right. if not boot back into safe mode and open the device tree. do to the new mb there doing to be muilt devices shown..the old mb and the new mb devices. remove everything so that the device manager is blank and reboot.
 

jambuttons

Commendable
Feb 22, 2016
1
0
1,510
I just experienced this on a 2014 ASUS AMI motherboard BIOS

None of my SATA HDD or SSD would turn up in the boot priority list. I would get Generic Storage Device on the top of the list, followed by USB HDD drives. The BIOS seemed to boot by testing all the drives present, and looking for an OS.

I assumed that my SSD was being misrepresented as this Generic Storage Device, so I thought my disk imaging backup/restore software had mangled the MBR or start sectors of the drive. But I couldn't figure out why all drives I put on SATA were like this, so I started suspecting I'd damaged the motherboard.

It took me a couple of hours to twig that the USB drives were being registered OK, but nothing I put onto SATA would be listed in the boot priority list. Eventually I pulled everything off SATA and USB, including the USB headers on the motherboard. The culprit turned out to be a wretched el-cheapo 5.25" USB front panel which was creating an illusionary Generic Storage Device, and somehow blocking the detection of everything else.

On my last 2009 mobo, I'd had quite a few boot jamming problems because of a lone USB storage device somewhere.