Sorry I’m asking this without specs at hand; I’m away from my desktop at the moment.
I built a PC a few months back, and went through this long, irritating ordeal of installing Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC (a driver wasn’t working for the video card; eventually the driver got updated, and now it’s great; otherwise, MASGrave is fantastic). I have a 2Tb PCI-e drive. But. Any time I try to install an old 3.5" 7200rpm SATA drive, it won’t even start. As in, nothing at all happens when I push the power button; it won’t even get to BiOS, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not an issue with trying to boot from a volume with no operating system.
The same hard drives work when I used them in a powered USB enclosure. They’re slow, because it’s over USB, but they work.
I think my power supply is 800W. My gut feeling is that my power supply is insufficient for the added power draw of a traditional hard drive. Does this sound correct?
In that case it just sounds like your on board SATA controller is not working. If you’re dead set on using these drives, you could look at a PCIe to SATA board. I have one in my server which has 10 SATA ports.
Would a bad SATA controller stop the entire computer from powering on at all if a SATA drive was installed?
Typically no since the southbridge isn’t entirely necessary. But if something is shorted that shouldn’t be shorted it could make the entire system freak out.
Have you checked the cables/ports on both ends? What about the HDD plugged into power but not data?
Last time I ran it, I had the power and SATA cable connected. I should try with just the power cable–no SATA–and see if it still fails to boot.
It sounds like your motherboard is not getting past POST. That means your PC takes issue with booting if a disk doesn’t spin up. Normally, you’d only get CPU, RAM and VIDEO tests in POST before it goes into boot. Do you have the startup check lights on your motherboard? If it doesn’t POST it will highlight where the problem is.
If it won’t boot it’ll be an issue with the boot disk, like if there are remnants of an OS on one of those disks. If it won’t turn on at all, it doesn’t even POST meaning your pc doesn’t agree with your hardware configuration.
Yeah, I’ve got the startup lights, and they’re visible through the case, but it’s not even doing that. It’s dead-dead; pushing the power button does absolutely nothing at all until I unplug the drive. I had issues with the first PCI-e drive (I returned it under warranty), and it would fail before BiOS, but I was getting a red light on the board. This is just… Nothing at all.
Did you already pinpoint if the issue is with all HDDs or just one? Like, connect one and try, disconnect, try the next? From your OP it seems like it’s just one HDD causing the issue.
If that’s the case, maybe boot into Windows and, after booting, put the broken HDD into one of your USB enclosures. Then run chkdsk on it. Maybe try CrystalDiskInfo too.
If your pc straight up shuts down the moment you connect the drive, chuck it before you do any more damage to your system.
I’ve tried each HD individually, and the system fails to turn on–not just fails to boot, but doesn’t even power up/turn on–with every single one.
I’ll try to remember to run chkdsk on them all this evening.