Poll of the Day > Anyone had experience with DOA HDDs?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I built my PC four years ago, and everything went swimmingly. Basically, I haven't had that much experience ordering faulty components, but I assume it just comes with the territory. I sent a message to one of my instructors, I'mma just copy-pasta it and see if anyone has any advice for my PC..

I thought I'd shoot a troubleshooting question at ya...here's the tale. One day, between 1-2 months ago, I decided to install a PCIe USB port expansion. When I rebooted after installation, two of my drives weren't working, along with my RGB lighting. The x4 lighting strips were only half lit, I could not change their colors, and this was the same with my one Corsair RGB fan. It was kind of half-lit, still spinning a-ok. My OS drive (m.2 NVMe) was fine, along with an SSD I have attached via SATA. Now, the other two drives (1xHDD and 1xSSD) were attached to the same SATA PSU power source, as was the lighting.
My first two guesses were
a) cable problem, or
b) I fried the drives/lighting somehow.

Tried multiple different known functioning SATA cables. No dice. So, I bought a new 4TB WD Black HDD because I thought "well, let's try something new, and maybe they got fried". No luck getting it functioning. Even with the known working SATA cables that power the functioning SSD I have. At this point, I did some scouring of the web. I thought "how can this new drive be kaput too, that's just too much of a coincidence!" I then bought a new PSU (550w, gold plated 80+ corsair) because I found the odd person mentioning weird PSU issues. Anyhow, got that installed, and it's still not the solution! Do you know anyone that could test these drives easily? Or should I just start the return process with the new 4TB drive? I'm feeling pretty dead-ended, and am just glad my PC is still powering on, haha. Do you have any recommendations?

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Also I've obviously detached all the potentially half-fried lighting at this point. Been testing everything individually.

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ReturnOfFa posted...

I decided to install a PCIe USB port expansion. When I rebooted after installation, two of my drives weren't working, along with my RGB lighting.

difficult or impossible to troubleshoot online, but it "sounds" like maybe you damaged the motherboard somehow. two drives should not fail simultaneously, especially with other things like lights, and a third drive not working in the same place means that it's probably the port(s).

if you know you have at least one working port (the one with your system drive), you should be able to connect one of the "dead" drives to that port and see it in the BIOS (after boot). if you have a known working port, and one drive shows up through it, and another does not, then the one that doesn't is likely truly dead. (this is a bit tricky/scary to test though since it involves disconnecting your system drive temporarily.)

another good way to test/confirm is to connect the drive to a secondary port on any other known working computer. the drive should appear in the BIOS, and should also become available in Windows.

(it is possible to receive a DOA hard drive, but the fact that you have at least some damage to your motherboard, and multiple failing drives, including a new one, would indicate to me that you have failed ports before it would mean that you had three drives all failing for separate reasons.)

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Is this just a hypothetical, or are you actually considering an RMA for four year old drives? Because, unless they're enterprise drives, the warranty has almost assuredly expired.

your motherboard is fucked.

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I feel like you guys are right on the motherboard. Although I can literally switch the good drive to any MOBO port and it works just fine. So the ports are good. But the MOBO could still be fucked and only be capable of picking up one SATA drive?

Nothing has been showing up in BIOS, aside from the OS drive (the NVMe M.2, haven't moved it),the good SATA SSD and that good SSD shows up properly on every MOBO port, but the other drives (including the new HDD) won't.

Does that still sound like the MOBO?

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ReturnOfFa posted...

I feel like you guys are right on the motherboard. Although I can literally switch the good drive to any MOBO port and it works just fine. So the ports are good. But the MOBO could still be fucked and only be capable of picking up one SATA drive?

Nothing has been showing up in BIOS, aside from the OS drive (the NVMe M.2, haven't moved it),the good SATA SSD and that good SSD shows up properly on every MOBO port, but the other drives (including the new HDD) won't.

Does that still sound like the MOBO?

Possibly. Although if they're working with a known working drive, I guess my next question might be have you performed a firmware upgrade while you were doing your other upgrades? If so, I would back up the configuration and try a reset just to rule out any rogue settings or firmware update snafus.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Although I can literally switch the good drive to any MOBO port and it works just fine. So the ports are good.

if the working drive appears on any port, and the other drives do not appear on any port... I would really want to try the other drives in another computer, and I would look for other factors that might be leading me to think that those drives are not working, like a faulty cable or jumper or setting or incompatibility, etc.

one thing to check with HDDs can be: what do they sound like when they're powered up? maybe it's not communication but power that's not making it to the drives? do they spin up? do they sound off when they spin up? etc.

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