HDD can't be seen by BIOS but...

I would like to hear any comments on the following problem.
I have an Asus F555 with a Western Digital Blue 500GiBi HDD.
The Laptop worked fine but then booting became intermittent (sometimes the drive was detected and other times not) and finally the drive could be detected at all.
In brief, the BIOS just says "Empty" when the WD drive is plugged in.
If I plug in an old Fujitsu drive the BIOS can see it and identify it just fine.
If I take my WD Blue and plug it into an external reader I can read it perfectly well.
I've tried pushing around the WD drive dozens of times in case of a dodgy connection but to no avail.
Can anyone suggest why the WD drive cannot be seen by the Asus BIOS yet it can be read by a caddy in my desktop and at the same time the Fujitsu can be read successfully by the Asus BIOS?
I've spent hours on this problem and it is very frustrating.
Thanks for considering this question,
Mike.

 

Welcome to the laptop forums site


It could still be a faulty hard drive, more than likely bad sector on
the master boot sector of the hard drive that's the first sector.

Hard drives are coming down in price all the time.

I would not trust my important data on that drive.

 

Thanks for your reply.
Do you think a faulty boot sector could prevent the bios from seeing the drive?
Maybe I could put the drive in the caddy attached to my desktop and run a program to fix the master boot record. I was reading about Fixmbr but I don't know if it will work on a drive that is not the current boot drive.

 

I don't think it's going to help trying to Fixmbr.

It's likely to be a scratched hard drive.

The only thing to try is do a surface scan to see if it shows a fault.

Here's a program for you to experiment with it's a partition manager.


https://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/partition-wizard-home.html