Adding another SATA drive hangs the whole computer ?

[abrogard]

I had a crash this morning.

 

Whole thing wouldn't boot past the 'Asrock' screen with press F11, F2 or whatever...

 

And in fact none of those worked. Though Ctrl-Alt-Del did. It would reboot fine enough. back to the same place.

 

I got the computer going again by putting another win10 system disk in it and it is running fine now.

 

So I tried to hang that old System disk off it as a data disk so's I can read it and hopefully get some of my stuff off it.

 

It doesn't work. Cold or hot. The system doesn't see it when I hot add it in.

 

When I boot with it already in the sytem will not boot. It hangs at the Asrock screen again.

 

The system is on SATA 1. This bad old disk is on SATA 3.

 

I've never heard of a disk on another SATA connection screwing the whole boot process. Is this a bug or perhaps even a deliberate attack, virus or something?

 

Anything known about it? Anything I can do to fix?

 

I'm going to get a new disk and put Mint on it and see if I can hang it off it. That's the only thing I can think of.

 

Anyone know anything?

[3s-gtech]

Yes, I’ve had this. The disk is dead. You may be able to access the contents by changing the disk controller (for one that is exactly them same, including firmware!)

 

It’s one of those situations where your backups are what saves you.

[Davit2005]

A USB SATA adapter is ideal for this, especially 2.5 drives that can normally be powered form the USB port. It stops any conflict where you might have to get files off a disk that already has boot partitions too.

[mikes]

yeah 3-G is right, I have seen SSD's slow computers down to a crawl - even if it was plugged in as a secondary disk and Windows shouldn't really be accessing it. One time in work after a half term, my workstation ground to a halt - it would take 20 mins to boot, 1+ minute to open a browser window etc etc. Checking eventlog revealed drive errors. Replacing the SSD fixed the problem.

 

But, if I ever plugged that faulty SSD into another workstation, even as just a 2nd drive, that entire computer would again grind to a halt - take ages to boot etc. I think Windows tries to index the 2nd drive and it just hangs timing out waiting for r/w threads.

I think this didn't happen with a USB-SATA converter so I used that to get the data off (it might however have just been that the SSD hadn't been used all weekend so ran quicker - I noticed that the faulty SSD would run OK for about 10 minutes if it had been unplugged for a few days wierdly)

[chazzy2501]

could be shorting out the sata connectors and preventing any sata device from working.

[nobley]

In the past, I've seen a faulty drive slow the system to a crawl. This was usually accompanied by a "knocking" sound from the drive. Have you tried connecting the drive as a slave drive after the system has started? This sometimes works with SATA drives.

[Icarus94]

I had the same issue many years ago highly suspect a faulty drive. The desktop was beyond sluggish installing windows from scratch with the secondary HDD connected. After much playing around I unplugged the drive and windows installed at the speed you would expect for the hardware. I ended up removing the drive and getting a new one.