BIOS cannot see my hard drive

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Sudokuu

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Dec 4, 2014
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A few days ago there was an unfortunate occurrence that caused a problem which I have run out of ideas to attempt to solve.

I have a Toshiba Tecra M11 laptop. The hard drive is a 320 gigabyte Hitachi.

My system was dual booting Windows 10 Technical Preview and Arch Linux. I was using Windows and it wanted to update but I was in the middle of something so I told it to wait. A few minutes later the system froze, as experimental systems sometimes do. I powered off by means of holding the power button. Upon restarting the system into Windows, it performed the Second half of the update. I worried it might have broken something, but there were no problems until the next time I booted. It went to network boot instead of grub as it normally did.

I thought maybe the update messed with my other partitions so I re-installed Arch (which is my boot partition). This had no apparent effect.

In case there was something wrong with the partition table I deleted and recreated the partition table, and installed Arch. Still no effect.

After this I thought the problem was most likely the BIOS. I went into setup and told it to restore default settings. No effect.

I powered off, removed the power cord and battery, hit the power button, removed the hard drive, replaced the power cord and battery, powered on. The BIOS did a more complete reset. I powered off, replaced the hard drive and powered on. No effect.

I got a BIOS update from here: Here. I got the same version that I already had. I re-installed the BIOS, which according to the feedback I got during installation removed the BIOS before installing the new one. No effect.

I've exhausted all the things I could think to try, so here I am. What is my next step, or have I damaged my computer irreparably?

Edit: Forgot to mention, I used gparted through a linux live usb to do partition editing, and forgot to explicitly state that only my BIOS has any trouble reading the hard drive

Update: I borrowed a friend's hard drive to test in the computer just to make absolutely sure it wasn't the hard drive, and his hard drive booted. So now I'm thinking the problem is with the hard drive. Still looking for suggestions on things to try.
 

Sudokuu

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Dec 4, 2014
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In the boot order I have sata set as the first option. The boot order also shows the names of devices it sees by each option; optical drive shows the name of my optical drive, network boot shows the ethernet port. However, beside sata it shows nothing.
 

jaguarman

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Feb 3, 2013
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So it sounds like BIOS isn't recognizing the drive. It also sounds like the Windows 10 tech preview or the update caused the problem which isn't exactly surprising... it probably did something to the drive to make it not bootable/recognizable considering the fact that another drive booted up just fine in your computer. What I would do is remove the problematic drive and assuming you do not care about the content on it (let me know if you do), plug it in externally to another computer. then, if you ever get to that point, let me know and I can explain the rest.
 

Stingerxxx

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Nov 22, 2014
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It sounds to me like it might be a corrupt BCD or BOOTMGR. It'd make sense that with the power off and experimental version these could be messed with. Especially since it didn't go to grub. I'd try to fix the bootmgr using a WinPE disk. I normally use Paragon WinPE (boot recovery media builder is the program that makes it, it's not free however).
 

padkman

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Feb 11, 2015
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Hello, I have excactly the same problem. I am able to take out the hitachi disk on an another computer and it works fine. Tried to format it but when i put it back in my acer laptop neither bios or windows installer recognise it, help plz.
 

Drew Pope

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Mar 26, 2015
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me too. exact same problem. windows 10?
 

Kuchyllo

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Mar 28, 2015
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4,510


 

Francis Thottungal

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Aug 2, 2015
2
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4,510


 

Francis Thottungal

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Aug 2, 2015
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4,510


I have had the same problem but instead with kali linux, I have two separate drives one running kali and one running windows 10. After rebooting into windows 10 from kali linux, my kali linux drive is gone even the bios can't detect. I am a computer noob but I think the problem lies within windows 10 secure boot, I believe couple of the distros dont have the signed key even though there supposed to.
 

theredscourge

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Sep 4, 2015
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Try updating the BIOS perhaps. Just be sure to get the correct file!

There has to be something wrong with the way the OEM set up the system if it's not the BIOS. I have just had this same problem when upgrading a Toshiba Satellite C850D PSC9SC-01K00W. Its first partition is a recovery partition, and C: is the 2nd partition. There's yet another recovery partition after that on the drive too. Weird.

So after the W10 upgrade's first reboot, the laptop started showing the white square cursor which indicates hard drive not recognized. Wouldn't even respond if I put in a CD or told the BIOS specifically to use the recovery utility or boot to an Arch Linux USB stick, just straight to the white square cursor of death. I took the drive out and everything else will suddenly boot if I change the boot options now, but that doesn't fix the fact that the laptop kinda needs the primary hard drive to work as before.

So I found I was able to boot it on my desktop, but it gave me a winload digital signature error. I figured it didn't copy the new bootmgr across, and I was right. I found one somewhere in the C:\$Windows.BT folder it made and backed up the one in C:\ and replace it. Drive still will not boot up with the laptop, but in the desktop, it loads fine, and the Windows 10 upgrade continued at 32% as if nothing had happened. Still probably not going to boot in the laptop after updates finish though. This is why I suspect it is BIOS. It's either that or the SATA port suddenly died exactly when I performed the upgrade.

Installing the BIOS update will be hard on this stupid Toshiba since it requires Windows, and since the laptop no longer recognizes the hard drive. I am going to grab a hard drive enclosure and another drive with a working Windows 7 installation from work and try to boot to that, then update the BIOS, hopefully that will fix my laptop. It's either that, or hope I can successfully roll back the W10 upgrade and that the laptop will recognize it again with W7 back on, then update the BIOS, THEN try the W10 upgrade again, but that's a lot of work too.

Update: not sure what did it, but after Windows 10 completed the installing progress to 100% and booted up on my desktop, the laptop seemed to recognize the drive again, even without BIOS update. Going to do that right now though, just incase!
 

frostyneck86

Commendable
Jun 7, 2016
1
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1,510
I fixed it.. All I did was use the installation CD and clicked on repair my computer ... I also checked to mange sure that my hard drive was not loose... Got safe mode back... And hard drive
 
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