New
#1
SATA drives keep disappearing after CMOS battery reset
I wasted days on this. Extremely difficult to pinpoint the problem. It started when my monitor went black. I removed the CMOS battery as a last resort to fix that. It didn't help. Then I realized I hadn't removed monitor power cable. That helped, picture was back.
Now I got a new problem. Very unstable SATA drives, they keep disappearing. I'm pretty sure the problem has nothing to do with BIOS or OS (Windows 7), because the problem is already seen on the boot sequence: gray text on black background, listing all the detected drives. The list is sort of random every time, some drives are there and some not on each reboot without touching anything.
I already thought it was one hard drive that was faulty, then I thought it was one SATA cable that was faulty but no. Each time changing hard drives or cables the problem comes back after a while.
Symptoms: (rotating) hard drive drive randomly disappears in Windows or is not detected on boot. Or everything loads extremely slowly (200 times slower than normal speed).
I have 2+6 SATA ports on my motherboard (Asus P9X79 WS). Drives on at least 5 of the ports have been disappearing, but it's probably totally random. Drives show 100% ok in SMART tests (when they are not disappeared).
My C: drive is an SSD drive and so far has not once disappeared but the rotating drives disappear. The computer can work totally normally for 8 hours (under 60°C temperatures) and then suddenly one drive may disappear.
Based on this description, what might be broken?