Optiplex 7010 2nd hard drive not recognized

Question

Greetings I need some help. I have a dell optiplex 7010 the motherboard is the 0773VG model. It has been acting strange any harddrive connected to a sata port starts making drive failure noises and is not recognized. The same drive connected via usb externally works fine and crystaldisc gives no errors. I've tried several drives including a brand new 4tb drive without success. The only one that works correctly is my main ssd. I changed the ssd to a different sata port and it worked fine. My bios is updated to the latest I tried different cables. thanks

bradthetechnut · Accepted Answer

According to the Optiplex 7010 Spec Sheet, it can take up to 1TB HDD's. Why would a 4TB HDD still work plugged in USB, that I don't know.

If you run into a problem with a drive showing up in BIOS, but not Windows - Uncheck the drive in BIOS, click Apply. Then recheck it and click Apply. I had to do this with one or more drives I added to my 7010, one HDD and one DVD drive.

Jon139 · Answer

Thanks  The drive is not recognized in the bios. All external drives work fine. I tested smaller internal drives without any success.

bradthetechnut · Answer

By any chance do you have the latest BIOS that's for your 7010, A29?

Jon139 · Answer

Yes I have the latest bios installed. It is the A29.

jajeczny · Answer

i have similiar problem, no matter what size additional hdd i add - 300/750gb or 2tb, it is not visible in bios nor windows, but when any of them is connected to sata, pc is very sluggish and boots very long. bios sata untick doesnt help. sometimes partition manager shows unknown disk that is not initialized, but i cannot do it, because it shows device not connected. I tried with different sata ports and cables with no luck.

bradthetechnut · Answer

A few ideas; is...?

SATA Operation in BIOS set to AHCI
Boot Sequence set to Windows Boot Manager
BIOS set to UEFI and not Legacy
Secure Boot on

Those are the settings that should be there for Win10 and are the settings I have with extra HDD's working. I also had to uncheck/delete IPV4 and IPV6 from Boot Sequence. Those are for booting from a network.

Can also try Update in Device Manager to get Windows to see storage HDD. Used that also.

Boot drive should be formatted to NTFS and using GPT partition scheme.

I imagine boot drive is already formatted that way if you have Win10. As for BIOS, you may need to reload Windows with those settings. To change those settings in BIOS without a reload can cause "No boot device found." Like if you go from Legacy to UEFI, ATA or RAID to AHCI, etc.

There might be a shortcut to change settings and still boot, but I don't know it as well.

If reloading Windows, if not already, download Windows 10 Disc Image (ISO File) to an 8GB or larger flash drive formatted to FAT32 and boot from it. Save important files externally first. Please let me or us know if you need anything further.

Ideal for Win10 is at least 8GB RAM. I'm running 12GB. Going from 4GB to 8GB will definitely speed it up, as well as an SSD for a boot drive.

bradthetechnut · Answer

Yah, if your 2.5' HDD is a thin 5v laptop drive, just the USB will be able to power it. Otherwise, if it's a 12v drive, it needs an external dock or enclosure that has separate power from household outlet. I don't know what size your 7010 is, so let's say you have the mini tower. One would think that one should be able to plug boot drive into either black or blue SATA port and use storage drives in the white SATA ports. If both white SATA ports are in use, storage drive plugged into black or blue SATA isn't going to hurt either. Black/blue SATA ports are 6GB/s and white 3GB/s. May be something isn't right with the motherboard? Not something I can quite tell from here.

jajeczny · Answer

i tried all possible settings and figured out, that something with my sata ports or cables must be wrong - everytime works only one hhd, connected to sata 0 with blue connector on motherboard. When connected to it, my 2tb 3,5 inch hdd works properly. Fortunately, my old disk is 2,5 so i could connect it thru usb adapter to copy everything.

bradthetechnut · Answer

The rail that goes to DVD drive and rail that normally goes to boot drive (HDD/SSD), both have 12v. Were HDD's that aren't detected known to be working in another system?

jajeczny · Answer

yes, i have MT. I ran dell troubleshooting and it says everything works, which isn't true. One thing i didn't check yet, is voltage on spare 12v sata cables from PSU - maybe there is the cuprit, but i used  different ones each time. Thanks for info about sata speeds, i'll connect dvd/card reader to white one.

jajeczny · Answer

yes, they were working in other computers, both thru sata and usb 3.0, while in 7010 work only on blue sata 0

bradthetechnut · Answer

I only have a few ideas left:

How to Perform a BIOS or CMOS Reset and Clear the NVRAM on Dell Computers Use a new size 2032 battery. Reset BIOS back to default settings. Make sure it stays on AHCI in case it goes to RAID.

Could be the motherboard. Replacement MB's for 7010's on eBay are fairly cheap if you consider it worth the effort.

Try a computer shop and see if they can diagnose the problem.

Optiplex Desktops

Optiplex 7010 2nd hard drive not recognized

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