Cool Story - Dead motherboard SATA ports

[Brian_B]

This is more along the lines of "Cool Story Bro", but figured I'd post it just in case it helps anyone else in the future.

Had a power outage today. My computer is on a UPS, nothing bad glitched or bugged out, and I happened to be sitting at it at the time. I wasn't doing anything important, so I just shut it down normally. No big deal. I left it down the entire time the outage was in effect. Power came back on, I did some work on a different computer, turned around to turn my PC back on.

This PC is an Asus ROG Maximus VII Gene with a 4790K. Mild OC to 4.6 Boost. Currently I'm running a 580G Samsung SSD, a newer 4.0T WD Blue, and an older 3.0T WD Red that was in my NAS.

So I turn the PC back on, and first thing I notice is it's taking a while to boot up - kind of sitting at the Blue Win10 starting up ring. It does eventually come on after a couple of minutes, and.... most of the icons on my Desktop are blank, and there's a stupid Microsoft Teams sign-in that I don't remember ever seeing before.

So first thing I think - stupid Windows Update dorked my computer. Did a bit more digging around... turns out my 4.0T drive is gone. Disk Management sees it, but says it is not initialized and wants to re-init the drive. This has most of my Steam library on it, and the drive sits at around 80% full. I wouldn't lose anything significant, but I have a crap ISP and it would take weeks to re-download my library again.

I decide to pull the drive and pop it in an external enclosure on a different computer. OS X sees the drive fine, no issues with the drive. I start working back on the PC - swapping SATA cables around and checking out what gets detected in the BIOS. Lo and behold, SATA Channels 1/2 are dead now - no drive connected to them shows as connected in the BIOS.

Not sure how much longer this motherboard is going to be alive in this world, now that "things" are starting to randomly drop out. Oddly enough, Windows doesn't report any issues with the SATA ports, and did detect the drive as connected even on the bad port - it just couldn't read the drive. Nothing shows up abnormal for the drive in SMART checking CrystalDiskInfo.

NFC where the red herring of Microsoft Teams came from. I uninstalled it once I got done dorking with the drives. That was the first I had seen of it, and I didn't have any recent Microsoft Update notifications. Also not sure if the power outage had anything to do with anything; we lose power quite frequently, and there are a couple of other computers on the same UPS - no problems with any of them, and I had a normal computer shutdown before the UPS even came close to low volts.

Anyway, if anyone has any advice going from here I'm open. The computer is back up and running on all drives - no reformatting or redownloading required, just not sure how much longer this computer will hang in there, but anything to make it last a bit longer (not because I don't want to build something fun, but more because I don't want to pay to build something fun right now)

 

[AntiQuark]

Using a spare drive I would install a new copy of Windows to see if it is now working.
Or restore a previous backup to that spare drive instead.
If it works ok then you know its a corruption or perhaps a stupid windows problem.

 

[jardows]

Other than what AntiQuark said, start saving money and looking for a MB replacement. You could get by with just a HBA to power your drives, but who knows what else will begin failing on the board.

 

[Dan_D]

Other than what AntiQuark said, start saving money and looking for a MB replacement. You could get by with just a HBA to power your drives, but who knows what else will begin failing on the board.

Booting from an HBA should be fine, but can come with its own challenges.

 

[Brian_B]

Fortunately for now, this motherboard has 6 on-board SATA ports. I'm only using 3 drives, so I have enough on-board SATA to not require a HBA at this time. I think if it gets to that point, it will be new computer time. Being a Z97 platform, replacing just the motherboard would be possible but problematic, and being DDR3 means any upgrade from that platform becomes a much more significant investment.

I had a lot of issues with this build early on spontaneously rebooting (oddly enough, after replacing every... single... part... turned out the only part that I could recreate it with was a Corsair H110i). I did end up building an entire second computer out of parts I replaced (for which my son is greatful), but once I got that narrowed down, I've not had any real complaints with it and have had it running for quite some time. It's not my longest running rig (i7 920 holds that title, which is still running today as a work computer), but it's been a good gaming rig overall.

If it dies, it's had a good run. But if I can get some more time out of it, I'm not exactly disappointed with its current-day performance. I don't want to start down the rabbit hole of throwing good money after bad though.