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No SATA drives detected in BIOS setup?

RusMakMonkey123
Level 7
Hello everybody! I would like to ask for some help regarding a problem I have recently encountered on my computer.
To start off I would like to say that I have an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard. I also have dual 1TB hard drives (Western Digital).
Now the problem:
After several failed attempts at booting Win7 I realized that the computer wasn't seeing my HDDs. Upon entering the BIOS setup I noticed a strange problem. In the "MAIN" screen of the bios setup, there are supposed to be 6 SATA ports shown. I had nothing, they weren't just not detected, they simply weren't there.
I tried changing up between the RAID, IDE, and AHCI in the storage configurations but it didn't change much. Except when I changed it to AHCI and then rebooted the comp, the SATA drives were listed but next to them there was a message in parenthesis saying they were not detected.
I opened up my computer and checked if all the cable were plugged in correctly, and they were.
When I try windows startup repair it only goes to the point where it asks you to load a drive (which I don't have apparently).
Obviously I cannot access windows7 in any way so I can't even check disk management.
I don't really know what to do anymore and there's quite a bit of information I would rather not loose on those drives. I would say I had about 500gb of space filled 😞
Any help would be appreciated, if there is any useful information I may not have mentioned, please ask me for it.
177,911 Views
47 REPLIES 47

Nodens
Level 16
Try powering off your system, remove the plug, hold the power button pressed for 30 seconds to discharge the board's capacitors and clear the CMOS. See if that fixes it. If not then remove all drives but one and check them one by one 🙂
RAMPAGE Windows 8/7 UEFI Installation Guide - Patched OROM for TRIM in RAID - Patched UEFI GOP Updater Tool - ASUS OEM License Restorer
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't!

RealBench Developer.

Zka17
Level 16
Where are those HDDs connected? I mean which to SATA controller?

I cleared CMOS using the "load default settings" option in the BIOS menu. I also updated BIOS using the EZ flash 2 method. If i clear CMOS again, will it remove the current update?
My first HDD is connected to SATA 1 and the second one is connected to SATA 2.
Actually I now see the all 6 SATA drives listed, but they say "not detected".
I think the i have Marvell SATA controller.

RusMakMonkey123 wrote:
My first HDD is connected to SATA 1 and the second one is connected to SATA 2.
Actually I now see the all 6 SATA drives listed, but they say "not detected".
I think the i have Marvell SATA controller.


If the HDDs are connected to the red SATA ports, try connecting them to the first two grey SATA ports which are the native Intel controller. Your HDDs are not going to need to be connected to the Marvell SATA 3 ports.

Zka17
Level 16
No, if you clear CMOS again, that will just load the safe defaults - your BIOS version will stay...

Is the Marvell controller enabled? Is it set to AHCI?

Nodens
Level 16
Did you try connecting just one drive? If one drive has gone bad it could be preventing the detection of all of them. So to rule things out try these:

Try adding just one drive, see if it's properly detected. Check them all this way.
If no drive works this way, try at least one of the drives on another pc if you can (to check if the drives are actually ok)
If the drives are ok and the board still doesn't see them then you probably need to RMA the board.
RAMPAGE Windows 8/7 UEFI Installation Guide - Patched OROM for TRIM in RAID - Patched UEFI GOP Updater Tool - ASUS OEM License Restorer
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't!

RealBench Developer.

Well i connected the HDDs to the 5th and 6th sata ports and it now recognizes them. however now when i boot the comp it just tells me "Missing Operating System" . I forgot to mention that my HDDs were originally set on RAID0(Strip). So i cant access data unless they are in that setting. There is an interface that allows me to create a new RAID set. It says that there are currently no RAID sets so my only option is to create one. i am afraid that if i create a new raid set it may wipe my HDDs.
I dont think i can access the hard drives individually since they functioned in the raid0 mode since the begining.

Nodens
Level 16
No you can not access the drives individually. You can create a new set safely as long as you don't choose to erase data during the process. Creating a RAID set option all it does is writing metadata at the end of the disk so that the controller can know which drives belong to which set, metadata version, etc etc. Just make sure that you put the drives with the correct order.
RAMPAGE Windows 8/7 UEFI Installation Guide - Patched OROM for TRIM in RAID - Patched UEFI GOP Updater Tool - ASUS OEM License Restorer
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't!

RealBench Developer.

Ok thanx i will try that.
Before anymore problems occur, (which i hope they dont), id like to thank everyone who has helped me. Im not out of the woods yet, but i've made some noticeable progress thanks to you guys!