Sorry I’m asking this without specs at hand; I’m away from my desktop at the moment.
I built a PC a few months back, and went through this long, irritating ordeal of installing Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC (a driver wasn’t working for the video card; eventually the driver got updated, and now it’s great; otherwise, MASGrave is fantastic). I have a 2Tb PCI-e drive. But. Any time I try to install an old 3.5" 7200rpm SATA drive, it won’t even start. As in, nothing at all happens when I push the power button; it won’t even get to BiOS, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not an issue with trying to boot from a volume with no operating system.
The same hard drives work when I used them in a powered USB enclosure. They’re slow, because it’s over USB, but they work.
I think my power supply is 800W. My gut feeling is that my power supply is insufficient for the added power draw of a traditional hard drive. Does this sound correct?
Yes, it starts and runs normally if I unplug the hard drive. If I plug any of my conventional hard drives back in, it goes right back to not starting at all. This is true of all three of my hard drives, which were all functioning normally in my prior computer, and they all work normally when they’re in a powered USB enclosure.
In that case it just sounds like your on board SATA controller is not working. If you’re dead set on using these drives, you could look at a PCIe to SATA board. I have one in my server which has 10 SATA ports.
Would a bad SATA controller stop the entire computer from powering on at all if a SATA drive was installed?
Typically no since the southbridge isn’t entirely necessary. But if something is shorted that shouldn’t be shorted it could make the entire system freak out.
Have you checked the cables/ports on both ends? What about the HDD plugged into power but not data?
Last time I ran it, I had the power and SATA cable connected. I should try with just the power cable–no SATA–and see if it still fails to boot.