Windows 10: Hard drive not appearing in BIOS after PC upgrade

o.k. was not sure. I have never had to bring something to a PC shop, consider myself lucky or experienced. Geek Squad decent,hmm o.k.

 

Just for a further clarification, I mentioned Geek Squad is NOT all that reputable. They are a big box company and wouldn't do things like trying a replacement interface board or some alternative to retrieve your data off the hard drive. They would just test it and say, yep - it's a bad hard drive, want to buy another one from us?

They did good for me when I returned a laptop I bought from Ebay and actually paid for extra warranty for, but it was for a common problem of a bad power connector which is an easy and common fix - but I would not trust them to go to the extra lengths to get your data off the hard drive.

If you a bit technically inclined you can look at the circuit board on the hard drive and see if it is plug-in or if it has soldered connectors to the physical drive. Then you might be able to purchase the same make/model hard drive and swap the interface boards.

Usually when the physical disk goes bad, bios will still see the hard drive - you just can't write or read from it - or it performs terribly. If the bios refuses to see the hard drive, that points to the interface board.

 

Missed that one word, as i never used them before. I had SSD do this intermittently disappear from BIOS and explorer,but was not the board in the end. As another drive has been on it ever since, that port specifically.

 

If you find the same drive model (and preferably close date of production with original), with a suitable screwdriver you can swap the circuit board and see if it comes to life. Needless to say that once you do that warranty is void, but it's worth it if you have valuable data. In the summer my dad's hard disk died from a power surge. It wouldn't be detected in BIOS. Likely I had a second disk of the same model. So I swapped the circuit board and I saved it. Now I have a spare drive without a working board, but I could use it once my dad's is old enough and start developing problems.

 

Sorry. Wasn't intended to be snarky. I'm trying to train myself to read posts more carefully than I've managed in the past. I miss sentences much too often.

 

Happened to me a number of times, misread posts and commented.

 

Thanks for all the replies. A few updates on the situation:
I plugged it into my younger brother's machine who also runs a Gigabyte motherboard to the same avail. It's like I didn't plug anything in.
Other brother then suggests I plug it into his machine and for some crazy reason it shows up there no problem. He ran some diagnostics on it (I can't remember the names of them sorry!) and they all showed up clean..he's studying computing/computer science at college and he is baffled as to why it didn't work on my PC, reckons that maybe Gigabyte is a bit fussy?
Anyway we managed to get maybe half the files off onto another disk to give back to me, then we tried to see if it would randomly work in my machine again (it didn't), but then also made a lot of uh, clunking noises, once we plugged into bro's PC again, and was even undetected a couple of times. It failed to copy files at once point too, so maybe it is dead???

 

Looks like it's pretty bad. Unfortunately with SATA drives you can't just change its control board, it's more involved than that. You can try one thing that worked for me couple of times. Unscrew (very carefully) it's control board, clean contacts with alcohol and put back.
Other things people tried (me too), if it's overheating and failing because of that, freeze it good in fridge and try while cold, you have 10-20 minutes to unload the stuff from it.
If spindle or heads are sticking, gently tap sides.
A friend of mine had also a peculiar problem when HDD would work properly only when data cable was connected after computer was fully booted, otherwise it was also a "sometime" HDD.
Problem with all those remedies is that it could terminate HDD.
There are services (expensive) that specialize in data retrieval, it depends how important data is.

 

Try updating the BIOS and then your motherboard would be more compatible and see the disk without any problem. Change the power cable with another, if available, just in case.

 

sorry for not updating the thread in a long time, it's been a really unstable and unclear situation so I haven't posted cause I just wasn't really sure what was going on. I think it's just safe to say the drive is failing; I managed to get one set of (very important) files off the drive via my brother's computer (running an American Megatrends (??) motherboard) but since then he's tried to copy other stuff across and it's failed a few times, so I think it's dead, we're just not sure.. we have concluded that maybe my motherboard is very fussy with harddrives and if it fails to connect or use a drive smoothly it just acts like it's not there, and that my brother's board is more forgiving with faulty drives, who knows!
thanks so much to everyone who helped, though!

 

Check your power supply unit. If it is faulty and doesn't give correct currents the disk may not work properly and not detected by the BIOS. Try a spare power supply unit.