If you'd like to jump to the chase, skip to the next paragraph. Earlier today, I had a power surge, causing my computer to reboot, and my turned off smart lights to spring to life. As my computer rebooted, it became clear it had no interest in actually posting. The screen just had a start-up code and the motherboard had an initialization code. I tried everything under the sun that I could think of. Swap ram, nothing. Remove CMOS battery, nothing. Clear CMOS button, nothing. Remove GPU and plug video into MB, nothing. Remove wifi card, nothing. Unplug all peripherals, nothing. As one last hail mary, thinking "this can't work, right?" I unplugged all my SATA drives. And, by some miracle, it posted. I plugged all the drives back in 2 at a time, and it posted every single time. That is, until I plugged in the 6TB WD Blue I bought recently.
Why would a hard drive cause my computer to not boot? Not only does it not boot *in the computer*, if I have it plugged into an external drive bay, it still won't boot. It will, however, mount just fine if I don't turn the bay on until I'm booted into Windows. I've already ordered a replacement from Amazon (as well as a tripp lite surge protector), but I would like to know if anyone has any idea on what caused this so I can avoid it in the future. It seems so strange to me that the *only* thing damaged was one single hard drive. All of the other hard drives are completely fine. The other computer I have on the same decade old surge protector is just fine. So is the monitor, network switch, speakers, etc, etc.