Hard drive not detected at bios

I have a machine that will no longer detect my samsung terra at bios. It seems to make the boot up noise and everything but it wont detect it at all. It does detect my other sammy but not this drive. I tried it in another machine and i get the same problem.

I swapped the circuit board from my working drive to the non working and still nothing. I have quite a bit of data on there if i can get it to boot that would be great and copy it all over.

Before this happened every now and then when i turned the machine on it would not show it as being detected. If i powered off the system a few times and turned it on it would come back, i thought it might be because it was Pentium 4 and it was old and dying but when i put it in my i3 it doesnt work.

Is this a SATA drive (probably)? You didn't provide any specifics on the hardware.

Have you tried moving the SATA cable to a different connector on the motherboard? I know you said you tried it in another machine, so that would suggest the drive itself is the problem... but still...

Try using a different SATA connector on the motherboard, and maybe even another SATA data cable.

Pull out the data cable and re-seat it, both on the drive and also on the motherboard.

I had a recent similar situation with a Western Digital Velociraptor drive, that I thought was going bad. Like you, I would try all kinds of different ways to coax it back to "normal operation", and mostly they would work. Eventually, I decided to replace it.

I ordered a new one, transferred the contents, and it all seemed to work perfectly, pointing to the old drive as the culprit. Then two weeks later the new drive began to act up again, just like the old drive had. Grrr..

Anyway, I decided that maybe it was my SATA #4 connector on the motherboard that was at fault. So I moved the cable over to the SATA #2 connector... and it's been perfect ever since (fingers crossed that this holds true forever).

I managed to get it to boot. When the machine was on in windows booted from another hdd, i plugged the sammy in and restarted it showed up. I powered down to connect another terra so i could clone it. Same thing not detected. So i unplugged it while it was on and replugged and it showed up in bios.

I ghosted it. I am going to rma this drive now.