I recently helped my son set up his new PC and we're trying to transfer his 1TB hard drive from his old computer. The hard drive was working fine before, but now it's not recognized at all on the new system. We've checked two different SATA cables and confirmed we're using the same Type 3 SATA power supply. The drive seems to power on—there's a humming sound—but it doesn't show up in the BIOS or Windows 11. We've checked the BIOS settings, and everything looks normal. Is there anything else we could try? I have an external case for it, so if we need to take it apart, that's an option. The drive was formatted and came from a Windows 10 setup, so I'm wondering if we missed something during installation.
4 Answers
If your new computer has an NVMe M.2 drive installed, it’s possible that some of the SATA ports are disabled. Double-check your motherboard manual to see if this is the case. It’ll also tell you which SATA ports are still active; you might need to switch your data cable to another port.
First things first, check if the drive is showing up in the BIOS or in Disk Management. If it’s not visible there, you'll want to troubleshoot further. You can access Disk Management by pressing Windows Key + R and typing `diskmgmt.msc`. If the drive doesn't show up at all, there might be a deeper issue at play with the new setup.
Another option you could try is using a USB to SATA adapter to connect the hard drive externally. This way, you can bypass any internal connection issues and see if the drive is recognized that way.
You could also check if the SATA ports are disabled in the BIOS settings. Sometimes, manufacturers allow you to turn them off at the motherboard level. Additionally, consider booting from a Live USB with something like Linux and using GParted to see if both drives are detected that way.
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