If it's not being detected in the bios itself then odds have it the controller board is toast.
You agreed with me but simply added extra unnecessary steps. I mean he can do that if he wants, but his son kept turning his machine on and off and........
If it was a bad SATA cable it would have given him issues to begin with. If he bought a new WD drive I bet it would boot right up on the same cable as it's pretty hard to damage one if it's simply sitting in a case. Considering the fact that he has had issue before with his kid shutting down the PC constantly and I've had HDD boards die from the same thing it points directly at it. I mean sure if he had another drive I'm sure he'd use it but it appears this is the only one he has since he said he would buy a new one. Context clues.Stop right there let me ask you this chief ?
Lets say he has another drive he can use.
Lets assume he "can" use it and a os, wouldn't be enough that alarm both of us to assume controller board isn't messed up ?
I've ran into controller issues back in the past before and I know if it were this problem directly. :/
Honestly I think its 2 problems, one of them I'm leaning at the sata cable first.
If I didn't think it were that I would agree and let you handle it.
I'll check back later and see what he does.
Like I was saying to Mike, his kid just pulls the plug from the last thread I read. If the machine is writing data constantly from surveillance and keeps getting the plug pulled like that it can kill a drive.Sudden power loss shouldn't have caused damage to the HDD if the PSU is of any quality, just saying... Maybe some corrupt data, but to the HDD, loosing power via shutdown or by a flip of the switch is loosing power, unless the PSU is flaky or not decent and somehow sent some bad power to the logic board. If that was the case, other things should be damaged as well on the same 5v or 12v rail that HDD was using.
First thing to try is a different SATA cable before anything else. If the SATA cable doesn't do the trick, try a different SATA port. No dice, then dead HDD. I have seen some funky happenings with some SATA cables.
This also can be caused by several different scenarios from improper computer shut downs to sudden power loss.
This when possible changes are made to the system area of the drive while the drive is in operation. eg slow reads of sectors might be moved or marked in a defect list while in use. although this happens. without your knowledge these changes have a great impact on the drives operation and if these changes fail to complete or the drive losses power half way through these changes you will have corruption in that particular system area module and the drive will no longer be recognized, seen as a different model, serial number is no longer visible or seen as hieroglyphics in the computer's BIOS
Replaced dead board, sent in for RMA, was sent back a new Seagate 500GB.