Hard Drive disappears

I had a new Intel hard drive installed and I reinstalled my system on it, my original hard drive being now used for storage.

Since then, occasionally the OS will freeze, and upon rebooting I will see a blue screen saying that booting is impossible and that recovery tools will be needed. The reason is that the system didn't find an OS to boot, and the reason for that is that the new hard drive just disappeared. In the BIOS, the new hard drive just doesn't appear anymore on SATA 1, while my original hard drive on SATA 2 still appears.

A temporary fix is to unplug and replug the new hard drive's SATA cable, which works occasionally, what works best is to just change the SATA ports, for example to SATA 2 and SATA 3, then the computer boots normally, and I can use it for another day or another few weeks, until it happens again.
  • if the SATA cable was faulty, then changing it (which I have) would have fixed the issue
  • if the SATA port was faulty, then the other hard drive would have disappeared too when plugged into this port, also changing to SATA 3 and SATA 4 (which I have) would have fixed the issue
  • if the computer hardware was faulty, then the other hard drive would have disappeared too, and re-plugging anything anywhere wouldn't have fixed the issue
  • if the new hard drive was faulty, it would never reappear or at least it wouldn't wait until I plugged it in again to reappear
I am no computer expert and I am running out of ideas...
 
"if the new hard drive was faulty, it would never reappear or at least it wouldn't wait until I plugged it in again to reappear" - invalid.

download manufacturer's drive test utility and have at it.
 
It sure seems like a SSD issue to me, did you change power cable too?

If so, I would suggest you might want to begin an incident report with Intel support.
 
It sure seems like a SSD issue to me, did you change power cable too?

If so, I would suggest you might want to begin an incident report with Intel support.

I only changed the SATA cables (the ones with the L shaped port), the power cable would be a multi-color one?
 
Yes, 'the other cable'. I propose the idea as it may be that your SSD is not always getting the right power from the PSU. Typically, these are not replaceable but they are switchable.
 
I suspected that there might be an issue with the BIOS, so I have updated it this afternoon (up 8 versions), it may have stabilized everything. If the issue reappears, I will try changing the power cable (change or switch depending which choice is available), and if it reappears again, I'll bite the bullet and send the drive to Intel. Thank you for your advice!
 
The "No bootable drive" symptom (assuming power and cabling are ok) is an issue with the partition table.
  1. truly missing
  2. missing the bootable flag
  3. not pointing to the kernel to boot
A good partition tool would be able to find and correct these issues.
 
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