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BIOS not detecting HDD unless both are plugged in

A

AiponGkooja

Senior member
As far as I know, there is nothing on my 250gb hdd, and windows and everything else is on the 300gb. I temporarily moved it all to the 300gb to try to use the 250gb to boot up a new build. Problem is, when I pull out my 250gb, my BIOS no longer detects ANY hdds, and I cannot boot into windows (it says to insert a book disc and hit enter). I have not tried to boot with ONLY the 250gb plugged in, because that seems pointless to me, as there is nothing on it...

Any idea why this is happening? And how I can make it stop happening? haha.

Thanks a ton,
Aip
 
Tried just unplugging the SATA cable from the 250gb, and it boots just fine (only detecting the 300gb). Power is still plugged into the 250 though, and the other end of the SATA cable is still plugged into the motherboard... Going to try other combinations to see what causes it to stop detecting...
 
Ok, seems like unplugging the power from my 250gb hdd is what causes it... If it's plugged in, it boots fine. If the SATA cable is unplugged completely, it boots fine, but only detects the 300gb. If the power cable is unplugged from the 250gb, it no longer detects the 300gb and will not boot.

Any ideas? It'd be kind of difficult to use the drive in my new computer and have it powered by the powersupply of my old computer... lol.

Thanks again,
Aip
 
Tried that. Also tried using a different power cable from the PSU. Still only works if both HDDs are getting power... leads me to believe that there's something wrong with my 300 that isn't allowing it to complete the circuit? and hence giving it no power, unless the 250 is on the same cable? But I have no idea how it works really, so I'm just speculating.

Thanks for the suggestion though! 🙂

Aip
 
Update again... I finally got it to work by turning off my computer, turning off my power supply (like usual), plugging in a power cord to both drives, turning on power supply, letting it detect the 300gb drive, unplugging power cord from 250gb (with computer still on), then restarting... Neat little security feature I suppose, but seriously, what the heck is going on... I don't want to have to do that every time I turn on my computer. 🙁 Could it be something as simple as needing to change the battery on my motherboard?
 
This might sound stupid, but doesn't your bios have settings that tell it to boot from HDD X or Y? I'm using 1 sata disk, and 1 ide disk, and 1 ide burner, and I had to set them correctly as slave/master etc. Not sure if it still works like that with sata though 😛
 
Tried messing with boot sequence, and setting all 4 boot device priorities to HDD, nothing works. Problem is that it doesn't even detect the first hdd if the power is unplugged from the second one.

Anyone else? I'm not really looking for a lucky fix, as I seem to have found one of those finally. I'm more looking for the underlying problem, as the cause-effect is completely eluding me right now. I figure it's power related (PSU, mobo battery, faulty power jack on the hdd, etc), because that's the only correlation effect I could find. And it's 100% consistent. Power to hdd 2 plugged in = any hdd connected by SATA is detected and computer boots fine. Power to hdd 2 unplugged = no hdd detected and no boot. *boggles*

Thanks again for the suggestions, still looking for an explanation unfortunately. 🙁

-Aip
 
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