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Beware some sata PCie cards kill hard Disks (recoverable though)
Hi folks
needed some extra sata ports on a PC -- used a "cheapo" 16X pcie card -- and guess what the 4 HDD's I had in the system were flagged as totally dead -- even BIOS cold boot couldn't see them.
Anyway removed card and BIOS still didn't see the HDD's.
Removed then (I'm an engineer --old fashioned type and simply don't believe 4 HDD's suddenly fail at the same time without seeing either a n electrical flash / blue smoke or smelling something ) -- so I removed the HDD's and inserted them into a Linux server and cold booted.
The Server bios recognized the HDD's -- formatted them with XFS (just to ensure the HDD's were also writeable) and then re-inserted these into the PC that failed to recognize the HDD's.
No prob =--BIOS recognized the HDD's and I could format them GPT and re-install windows.
If I had believed the original diagnosis I would have either chucked 4 X 4TB HDD's away or the PC or even both.
That external SATA card must have screwed up something horribly !! fortunately it was only a 15 EUR mistake and a few hours of time.
Don't always assume that if something fails once it is always faulty - especially if you are talking about multiple devices -- had in this instance say 3 out of the 4 HDD's initially worked I would have tossed 1 HDD -- but 4 out of 4 is so unlikely it was worth testing again.!!!
Cheers
jimbo
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