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No-start when adding an additional hard drive (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 months ago by HelixDab2@lemm.ee to c/buildapc@lemmy.world
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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?

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[-] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Hard drives do not consume much power, lower than 20 watts.

[-] Vinny_93@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

It's highly unlikely this is due to your power supply, unless you have a 600W GPU and even then it should at least start.

It does start after you've uncoupled the hard drive? If not, you may have snagged another power cable somewhere. Have you double checked that you turned your PSU back on after installing the hard drive?

If all else fails, you'll just have to remove every additional component, try to get into the BIOS, turn off, install another component and keep going until something breaks.

But if it doesn't start even without your old hard drive, I'll bet you've either forgotten to turn your PSU back on or maybe the little finicky cable for the power switch isn't in properly.

If it does start without your old hard drive, you can pretty much write off that hard drive. Most likely it's causing a power surge or something and it's actually dangerous putting it in your PC.

[-] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago

Yes, it starts and runs normally if I unplug the hard drive. If I plug any of my conventional hard drives back in, it goes right back to not starting at all. This is true of all three of my hard drives, which were all functioning normally in my prior computer, and they all work normally when they're in a powered USB enclosure.

[-] Vinny_93@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago

Would a bad SATA controller stop the entire computer from powering on at all if a SATA drive was installed?

[-] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

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?

[-] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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