Hi, I haven’t been on the forums for a long time but I just had a major malfunction with my PC…
I was short a sata cable to plug into some harddrives so I went to the local PC shop to buy a 6 pin to SATA cable (to PSU).
Anyway, I have bought a new PC case that had a fan controller from China. I plugged the cable into it for power, and when I turned on the PC the cable started to burn…
I presumed it was a dodgy hub… not the cable…
So I added the cable to a new SSD I was installing.
When I turned on the PC it just flashed on and straight off…
So I thought it was the RAM etc etc everything but the cable…
Anyway, Eventually I was down to troubleshooting the harddrives… I really thought they couldn’t be broken, so I unplugged the cable…
The computer booted to Bios, but when I installed the new cable, the Bios doesn’t recognise any drives or SATA components.
Unfortunately these things happen. The important thing to do is realize where you made the mistake, and then take action to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I just ordered USB Harddrive enclosures and then remembered I can always just get PCI adapters for SSDs. Thank god I only lost a 120 GB and 250 GB SSD from 4 years ago. I think if the m.2 works and with the adapters I should be fine.
Have you tried the board without the cable or drives to see if it still works? If the board still posts then you could try finding another drive with the appropriate power adapter (maybe steal one from an optical drive) and see if it actually did any harm to the board. I’t possible that just the drive internal controller was damaged and not the motherboard. I certainly wouldn’t be tossing out a new board without giving it a meticulous inspection to see exactly what does and doesn’t work.
It’s the MB I think. I plugged it into one SSD, which maybe fried, but the other HDs don’t work in it. The PC posts fine. The CPU, GPU etc are fine. The SATA controller is burnt out. No biggy, there are actually loads of ways to connect HDs and SSDs now… I just forgot about them.
Not sure how a wrong power cable to a SSD would fry a motherboards sata controller.
That sounds kinda weird to me.
I would rather suspect that the said drive is just fried.
And if there are more sata power connectors on that same cable,
which you connected your other drives to aswell.
Then those drives might be fried aswell.
If you have an optical drive arround and the appopriat sata cabels,
then i would say just try that firstlly.
Maybe the issue is with the psu.
A modular psu should have more ports to connect sata power cables to.
Another option you might try, is to disconnect the system from wall power.
And then take the bios battery out for a couple of seconds and put it back in again.
Then connect some other drives NOT the fried one, and use new sata powercables.
And then see if the bios detects the drives again.
Could be that the bios just went bonkers, happens sometimes.
A hard reset sometimes does miracles.
But a fried sata controller on the motherboard still sounds a bit unlikelly to me.
Atleast from what i could gather from the OP.
Not too bad, total cost probably about £150 of damage. It could have been worse.
I guess the mobo is fine… I don’t have any SATA devices left to test it!
I bought a 500 GB M.2 instead. That should be fine. Ubuntu boots off a USB no problem, and the system is in good order.
You live you learn… I should have known about the PSU though… I’ve been putting together PCs for the past 20 years but didn’t know (first one was a k6-2)… That’s kind of hilarious.
assuming it isn’t also fried you might want to solder the spi flash chip from the broken board to the new. not all HDDs are the same and the chips are precalibrated at the factory for specific drives.
As a data recovery specialist, the days of swapping logic boards are over. You can still do it but it has to be the exact same number and you have to swap the tiny PCB chips on the two logic boards. This has been the case for many years now. You will need foil, a heat gun, and a micro-soldering iron.
I wouldn’t feel too bad, this is a common mistake even experienced builders make. Perhaps not exactly the way you did it, but many people don’t know that PSU’s aren’t standardized in this way.
