Storage Unrecognizable After Power Interruption

BaalPrime · April 17, 2020

Hello Linus world! Nice to meet you all. This is a somewhat unusual troubleshooting thread because I think I have the solution in hand already, because for whatever reason I couldn't get into the ROG and Tom's Hardware forum sites (weird I know) and had to figure it out without directly talking to anyone. That said if anyone can more accurately diagnose the problem or offer a more immediate solution then I'd be grateful. Here are specs:

-Windows 64 bit

-AMD Ryzen 3900x

-ASUS ROG Crosshair Hero VIII (BIOS 1302, it shipped with this version which is the latest)

-GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super WINDFORCE OC 3x 8G

-CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB

In a nutshell, I pulled the plug on my PC after changing memory frequencies and now none of the storage devices attached at the time work.

So I'm a new PC builder (believe me, I'm sure any vets among you reading this will roll your eyes at my mistakes) and two days ago I completed the setup of my new PC and had everything installed and ready. Now that it was all good to go I wanted to dabble in memory speeds. I Manually set the speeds to the speeds advertised on the box. I did this manually because I could not find DOCP option (which I now know is prominently displayed in ez setup) and I thought it was just as simple as turning the frequency to 3600. When I left BIOS the computer screen went black and didn't do anything for several minutes. "Oh crap I thought," and like an idiot, I disconnected power. When I turned it back on it also went black, so flashed CMOS to get rid of those settings. When it came back up it wouldn't leave BIOS (it just keeps looping back into BIOS).

Poking around I found that it won't recognize the storage devices. In BIOS I can see them connected to the SATA cables and stuff (and the M.2 windows is installed to), but they're greyed out. The boot order is also greyed out and I can't change it or access it. In BIOS the CPU and the RAM are still listed, and I'm viewing all this via the monitor plugged into the graphics card, so I assume that all of those things are still fine. I tried various different solutions I found by browsing google, but none of the cases I came across were the same as mine. I did some stuff having to do with safe boot mode and such but none of them produced results.

I still had my USB with windows install media on it, so I put that in, unplugged all the SATA to the storage but left the M.2 in and turn it on. The PC came out of BIOS and went to install windows off the USB as if it was a fresh install; but when it gave me the options of which drives to put it on (remember only the M.2 is plugged in) it said that M.2 wasn't valid for windows because it had a MBR parition table instead of GPT. I tried to format it using the button provided, but it didn't work, so I looked up how out how to do it using the console commands, but still no dice.

So by process of elimination to me it looks like the storage devices were corrupted or something. I ordered a new one to test out this hypothesis. Hopefully I'm right and I can just replace them, then maybe even recover them at a later date. There wasn't much valuable data on any of the drives, just games and porn, so if I'm correct I'm not too worried. I want to be right about this and pay for my rashness with cash and time, but I'd rather not have to pay more than the price of another SSD rather than a new mobo or something.