HDD not found anymore

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
Hi guys,

My parent's desktop has a problem with its HDD as of lately. From what I understood, it might be due to a lightning storm killing the power in our house. After that, the HDD was not found when booting. When I start the computer, it looks for iPv4 and iPv6 then gives me the no HDD message.

I took it out of the desktop and plugged it into my old desktop and tried to see if I could access it. Nope, it doesn't appear anywhere. So I downloaded Seatools and made the two basic tests (long and short) and both were OK. I'm not sure if the problem is from the HDD or maybe the motherboard?
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
SATA mode might have been reset.

When you hooked it up to your own computer to test it did you assign a drive letter to it? If it passed Seatools it should be fine and likely just not configured correctly. If SATA options got reset, which isn't unusual with power strikes, you need to match it with what it was when Windows was installed. Likely AHCI or IDE mode. What brand of desktop is it?
 

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
SATA mode might have been reset.

When you hooked it up to your own computer to test it did you assign a drive letter to it? If it passed Seatools it should be fine and likely just not configured correctly. If SATA options got reset, which isn't unusual with power strikes, you need to match it with what it was when Windows was installed. Likely AHCI or IDE mode. What brand of desktop is it?

Oh good, this might not be as bad as I thought. It's an HP Pavillon.

EDIT: on my old desktop I have to HDDs. I replaced one of them (the one without Win) to test it. On Seatools, it appears under USB - 1394 while the other HDDs are under SATA - PATA .
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
That's probably because you have it attached via USB and not SATA directly to the board.

Just go through and try each SATA mode in the BIOS and see if it loads. Does the BIOS pick up the hard drive at all? Listed anywhere in there?
 

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
That's probably because you have it attached via USB and not SATA directly to the board.

Just go through and try each SATA mode in the BIOS and see if it loads. Does the BIOS pick up the hard drive at all? Listed anywhere in there?

It's actually plugged in at the same place my other HDD (that appeared on SATA - PATA) was.
 

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
OK @Darren it does appear under the config panel (F10 at startup) but it still says that no boot drive has been found or that it is broken. :/
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
OK @Darren it does appear under the config panel (F10 at startup) but it still says that no boot drive has been found or that it is broken. :/
Try different SATA modes?

Do you have a Windows USB with the ISO or installation media? Can usually repair it through startup repair or monkeying around in the command line.

If they don't have anything important on it just try to nuke the drive and reinstall.
 

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
OK I'll try to download the Media creation tool. Let's see if the repair works, because they'd like to keep their data :/

By the way, I've tried the different SATA modes.
 
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Punk

Moderator
Staff member
OK @Darren I'm trying to reinstall Windows by formatting the HDD. Thing is it shows up on the screen but has no space at all (0.0 used and available too). It's called Drive 0space unallocated but I can't format it either...

I'm guessing this drive is dead?
 
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