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SSD Vanished from BIOS

BardAnon
By BardAnon
in Troubleshooting
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Go to solution Solved by bezza...,

try unplugging the ssd and blowing on it to clean the connectors??

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So, I got a hard drive that I wanted to install in my old Alienware Aurora R6 as a second drive. I opened the side panel and realized I didn't have a SATA cable for the drive. However, since I never use the attached CD drive anymore, I decided to just take the SATA cable from that and plug it into the new hard drive. I did not touch my SSD, which is my boot drive, at all. I powered the computer on and got an extremely brief "Checking Media Presence" message before the screen displayed that there was a failure and it could not boot.

 

I tried unplugging the SATA cable from the new drive and reattaching it to the CD drive, but the error persisted. After looking through Alienware's crappy BIOS, I noticed that the SSD was not showing up as a boot option in the boot priorities list (to clarify, I assume it should show up here, but my troubleshooting skills are still pretty basic, so I could be woefully mistaken). I got to a screen that let me run a test on different aspects of the computer. As best I can tell, the SSD should be fine, but running a test on the cables gives an error message.

 

I tried flashing the most up to date BIOS from Alienware for the R6 from a USB, and the bios update was successful, but the situation persisted. The computer would not boot and would not show the SSD as a boot option.

 

I am not entirely sure what to do at this point, as the computer was working fine just a minute before this. All I did was unplug the CD drive, and everything went to heck. After work, I'm going to try to replace the SATA cable connected to the SSD with a new one to see if that helps, but otherwise I've exhausted the options I've been able to find online. Any other ideas I could try?

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On 5/2/2023 at 8:50 AM, Tomberry said:

try unplugging the ssd and blowing on it to clean the connectors??

...It worked...

...

...I never would have expected using the game cartridge cleaning method would fix a problem with a computer, but holy crap it actually worked! 

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https://linustechtips.com/topic/1504398-ssd-vanished-from-bios/#findComment-15922244
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