Question: I am sick to my stomach over this. I was just building a new Windows 10 PC with a ton of hard drives for the sole reason of not just a gaming machine, but one where I would store all of my data and I was going to begin a backup process tomorrow. This is the worst timing/luck ever!
Videos of my two 5 year old daughters and my two three year old sons are gone, as well as some VHS tapes I ripped that had the only remaining videos of my sister who passed away not long ago (I was literally planning on backing these all up TOMORROW). I have photos backed up to Amazon’s cloud but they don’t accept videos so those are all gone.
Here is what happened: I had a desktop gaming PC that had 8 hard drives in it. The CPU (Intel 9700k) processor I installed last year died, so I replaced it yesterday. I also bought a new PSU because I had 3 motherboards die (plus the CPU) in the span of a year, so I figured my PSU was somehow frying my hardware. So I installed the new CPU and PSU yesterday and my PC finally booted up for the first time in a while.
However, I noticed only 4 of my hard drives showed up in Windows. I went into my BIOS, and had the same thing. Not recognized.
I took the 4 problematic drives out of my case and tried to power them up in a friend’s PC and had the same issue. Zero power. I also tried an external USB hard drive caddy (one that uses wall power of course since these are all 3.5″ drives) and they simply aren’t receiving power.
I believe somehow my old power supply fried them just as my CPU went down. Either that or the APC UPS battery backup device I have is somehow frying the insides of my computer. I have already ordered a new APC UPS battery backup device just because of how paranoid I am as to what could have caused this. It’s definitely not the new PSU as I have tested the voltages on each SATA line and they are all within spec.
Here are the drives that died:
Drive 1 front:
http://imgur.com/aiChtaR
Answer:That’s weird. A drive can cause Windows to stall or stutter for up to 10 seconds or more if it hits a patch of bad sectors that require retries, but I would think that a data drive should not cause Windows to crash, especially if it has not yet been formatted. OTOH, an OS drive that has an unreadable system file may cause Windows to crash.
Sorry, I’m stumped. All I can suggest is to establish a stable OS environment and subject your drive to a full surface scan, followed by a SMART report. You might need a “live CD” of some sort to do this.