My friend recently installed a new M2 SSD into her PC, which already had an OS drive on a hard drive. After the installation, her computer started asking for a bootable device even though there was one. When we checked the BIOS settings, it only showed the new SSD and her additional storage HDD, not the OS drive. We later found out that the SATA slot connected to her OS HDD had been disabled. Can anyone explain why this happens?
5 Answers
Some motherboards disable certain SATA ports when specific M.2 slots are in use. You should check the motherboard manual; it usually has details on this. There are M.2 slots that don’t disable SATA ports, so see if you can use one of those instead!
You might want to try moving the SATA cable for the OS drive to a different SATA port. Sometimes that can help recognize the drive again.
Many modern motherboards will disable M.2 slots or SATA ports depending on how they're configured. The solution is usually in the motherboard manual, which should show you the ports that get disabled based on what's plugged in.
It really depends on which M.2 slot you put the SSD in. For instance, my motherboard has 4 M.2 slots, but using the bottom one disables 2 SATA ports. If you can, try switching to a different M.2 slot or moving the hard drive to another SATA port.
I faced a similar issue when I upgraded to a larger M.2 SATA drive, and it just disappeared. A workaround for me was turning off Secure Boot and enabling Legacy and UEFI support. After adjusting these settings and restarting, my drives were detected again.
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