New PSU fried SSD drives?

A

Aumakua

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 14, 2009
Messages
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has this ever happened to anyone? So I just installed a new board, cpu, ram (skylake setup) a couple weeks ago and everything has been running fine except my power supply was a little long in the tooth (5+ years) and I think I was having some overclocking/stability issues because of it.

I decided to order a new EVGA P2 (platinum rated) 750 watt supply which has great reviews.

Hook it all up last night and NOTHING, wouldn't turn on, everyone's worst nightmare when building a new computer as now you have to find the problem.

nice thing about EVGA is they ship a tester with the unit, so I was quickly able to see the PSU was working and the problem was elsewhere.

After about an hour I pinpointed that one of my SSDs wasn't allowing the computer to power on, it gave that split second fan twirl and then nothing, I unplugged that SSD and everything powered up! I thought great (except for the data on it, wasn't main drive though), and then I go into BIOS and my main drive isn't showing up! spent the next 2 hours trying to figure out why, changing cables, drives, everything, its the only thing that won't hook up. I have 3 other HDD and a DVD that all are hooked up and work fine, tried everything I can think of, even put windows on a new blank drive I got to see if Windows could find the drive, and nothing!

at least I can power on the computer with that second SSD connected but its not detecting it, which makes me think it has to be a problem with the SSD.

Like I said before EVERYTHING was working fine before the PSU swap, I unplugged the power to the old one before removing anything too. So I am thinking somehow the new PSU fried those two SSDs? is that possible? do you guys think either one can be salvaged? The one is a 5 year old Intel 120GB, so not worth much but as I said before the other was my main drive, a newer Crucial 500GB SSD, that's the one that will allow the computer to power on but can't be found.
 
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The easiest way to check if your SSDs are indeed fried, is to give them to a friend of yours and see if they are being recognised by his/her bios.
 
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unfortunately I am a loner on building computers, no one I know does it, cousin 2 states away is who got me into it 20 years ago! :(

I was thinking of buying an external dock for $25, I thought I read somewhere that someone was able to read their drives from one of those (connected through USB 3.0) when their BIOS wouldn't read it.

my main concern is data recovery (game mods, saves, photoshop projects, basically tons of hours worth of "work") as that's more valuable than the drive which I can replace for $150...

at least the external reader is probably worth a shot, buy from amazon with prime 2 day shipping, if it doesn't work I am out $5 return shipping on it, much cheaper than data recovery (financial files and others I may not want them to see, LOL)

Also I really want to know what caused problems on TWO different SSD drives! if its something the PSU did, I really hesitate to use it, one drive I could see some freak incident but two of them (different manufacturers, ages, and were hooked up to different SATA power cables)
 
But you said you changed the PSU to a new one because of stability issues.
It's entirely possible the drives were either 'walking dead' (severely damaged and failed randomly soon after) or the problem sits somewhere else. In this case I'd mess around with the BIOS setup, re-seat cables (both power and data, make sure they have tons of slack!) and try a different motherboard.
 
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michalrz said:
But you said you changed the PSU to a new one because of stability issues.
It's entirely possible the drives were either 'walking dead' (severely damaged and failed randomly soon after) or the problem sits somewhere else. In this case I'd mess around with the BIOS setup, re-seat cables (both power and data, make sure they have tons of slack!) and try a different motherboard.
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yeah its not the cables that's for sure, connected a new SSD to the same cables and it detected it right away! which makes me think it has to be the drive itself.

things I am going to try next:
1) SeaTools for DOS, on Seagate's website it looks like this can be used to detect drives that BIOS does not (even though I don't have a Seagate product)
2) I still have my previous motherboard, RAM, CPU, thinking I will set that back up and see if it detects the drive, if it does then its obviously a problem with the new motherboard
3) buying the external docking station and crossing my fingers I can access the data even if the drive will no longer be usable in the future (then I would probably try to RMA it as its less than 1 year old).

I am hoping to find some sort of solution (possibly helping someone in the future with a similar situation as I couldn't find anything on it while searching).
 
Aumakua said:
yeah its not the cables that's for sure, connected a new SSD to the same cables and it detected it right away! which makes me think it has to be the drive itself.

things I am going to try next:
1) SeaTools for DOS, on Seagate's website it looks like this can be used to detect drives that BIOS does not (even though I don't have a Seagate product)
2) I still have my previous motherboard, RAM, CPU, thinking I will set that back up and see if it detects the drive, if it does then its obviously a problem with the new motherboard
3) buying the external docking station and crossing my fingers I can access the data even if the drive will no longer be usable in the future (then I would probably try to RMA it as its less than 1 year old).

I am hoping to find some sort of solution (possibly helping someone in the future with a similar situation as I couldn't find anything on it while searching).
Click to expand...

Did you check the video i put above?
With the change of the PSU, some bios settings might have been reseted .
Check the video, it's very possible to give you the solution to your problem.
 
Sith'ari said:
Did you check the video i put above?
With the change of the PSU, some bios settings might have been reseted .
Check the video, it's very possible to give you the solution to your problem.
Click to expand...

yeah I checked it all, if it was a setting I don't think it would be recognizing any SSD or hard drives, and it is recognizing everything but this one. Plus the ASRock board only has SATA, no other option. I tried resetting my BIOS too (took battery out).

Thanks for the help guys, I know without having access to the computer its impossible to tell what exactly happened (unless the exact situation has happened to you, which is what I was hoping for when posting this).
 
If the BIOS can't see it, it means the controller might not be seeing it either. Or failing to communicate with it. Yes, as you mentioned some programs can send commands directly, but the tricky part is to determine where to actually dispatch the commands to.
You'll probably have to trial-and-error each detected controller.
I believe MHDD can also operate in agnostic mode sending out commands into the blue.
Some fun stuff was possible back when drives like Seagate had those master/slave/cs pins that could be used as send/receive paths directly to the drive's controller. You'd use telnet to send obscure undocumented spells :D
 
Your old PSU probably killed your drives. Hopefully you don't have any more failures coming on that shiny new hardware.
 
That has to be the last thing I would try! you can easily total your board and drive.
 
You however simulate some of those steps by using SeaTools or MHDD, maybe 'hdparm'.
Stuff like EID (reset, identify), spin up, spin down, read sector...
 
If you're having trouble running the tools let us know.
I'd begin with setting the controller mode from AHCI (if it is in such position) to "Legacy IDE" or "IDE" or "Compatible".
You probably want to hammer the F12 (depending on motherboard) during start-up to get a clear way of choosing the right device to boot from (a utility CD/DVD live CD which you can find online).
 
michalrz said:
That has to be the last thing I would try! you can easily total your board and drive.
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How do you think eSATA works? Or any drive dock for that matter?

SATA has hot swap ability. Doesn't matter if the data or power is connected first. It should just work.
 
I'm willing to agree, but would it need to be configured properly first? does the disconnection itself use some protocol like disabling the link? or any other provisions? Is it also okay to use on a non-responsive drive and/or controller? I'm asking, didn't use the feature.
 
So I have tried everything and nothing works. Put my old setup back together and it won't read it.

New motherboard only had SATA options. Old one I tried ide and nothing.

Old power supply still works, I think the new one somehow fried it, not sure how, but for it to happen to two drives that worked last night and other ones are okay? The power supplies are supposed to have built in safeties against this stuff happening (the ones I own at least).

I ran seatools dos off an dvd rom and it didn't detect it, in fact nothing loaded because I only had that drive plugged in.
 
Aumakua said:
So I have tried everything and nothing works. Put my old setup back together and it won't read it.

New motherboard only had SATA options. Old one I tried ide and nothing.

Old power supply still works, I think the new one somehow fried it, not sure how, but for it to happen to two drives that worked last night and other ones are okay? The power supplies are supposed to have built in safeties against this stuff happening (the ones I own at least).

I ran seatools dos off an dvd rom and it didn't detect it, in fact nothing loaded because I only had that drive plugged in.
Click to expand...

That sucks... Not sure how the PSU would have fried only those two and not the others at the same time.

You may want to check and make sure the data/power connections on those drives don't have messed up solder connections. You could have tweaked them just enough when unplugging or plugging them in to crack/break a solder connection.
 
Now this just keeps getting stranger! so I finally gave up, hooked up my new motherboard again with the drives I know are working, AND added two of my "media" drives to the mix, these are drives that I disconnected before the new power supply issue even came up, I never connected them to my new system because my motherboard only had 6 SATA slots (old one had 8).

Now my new setup won't detect those two either. Its not wires either because I tested them on the other hard drives, I tested all the connections on the motherboard and they all work with the known working drives! how in the world can 4 hard drives all of a sudden not work, but 3 do work (same brands, so its not that).
 
Aumakua said:
Now this just keeps getting stranger! so I finally gave up, hooked up my new motherboard again with the drives I know are working, AND added two of my "media" drives to the mix, these are drives that I disconnected before the new power supply issue even came up, I never connected them to my new system because my motherboard only had 6 SATA slots (old one had 8).

Now my new setup won't detect those two either. Its not wires either because I tested them on the other hard drives, I tested all the connections on the motherboard and they all work with the known working drives! how in the world can 4 hard drives all of a sudden not work, but 3 do work (same brands, so its not that).
Click to expand...

So, in order to understand, you changed mobo, and put back your old PSU, and now it doesn't detect hard drives that previously were being detected (*and weren't even tested with the supposedly "bad" PSU)? :eek:
-I have one last comment to make, which has to do with a past experience of mine:
I used to have an old tower, at which i had very tightened the screws of my mobo on it, and for some reason, this was causing short-circuit, and the pc wasn't powering up !!!
I had to call electrician who managed to spot the problem, -he left one screw out, and the pc powered up!!-. I would never have found it by myself. !!:(
Of course mine and your problem aren't identical, but they might come from similar cause, so i share it as an extra knowledge that might somehow be related to your problem.:confused:
 
Since things are getting weird, try using the newer SATA cables that came with your board if you aren't already.

(You mentioned using different SATA cables, but not if the SATA cables were the one that came with the new setup)
 
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