BIOS lists hard drive as 0GB, and yet

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

The 500GB hard drive in my Windows 8.1 laptop is no longer recognized by the system. Here’s the thing though…
Windows recovery cannot identify the Drive: Both Windows Options and the actual BIOS identify the drive as a 0GB drive with ID 00000000.
I put a different working hard drive into the computer, and an hour later after reinstalling Windows, that drive also stopped registering, and is now also a 0GB drive with ID 00000000, courtesy of the BIOS.

The thing is, on an Ubuntu 14 live CD, the hard drives are not only registered as 500 GB Disks, they are capable of mounting, reading, and writing. Also, RIGOUROUS hard drive scans via the Ubuntu live CD, these disks are labelled as Healthy with no errors or bad sectors. To confirm this, I copied every file off both disks with no issue, and then scanned again. No issues.

This being the case, how can the BIOS not recognize a hard drive, yet this OS claims the disk is perfectly functioning, and is fully accessible? Either two hard drives failed within an hour of each other, or something else is at work here. Any ideas?

2

CinnabarScyro,

Check if the Bios has an update available that need’s to be done.

Let’s see if any of the users have heard about this case.

3

The drives appear to be configured to Power Up In Standby (PUIS). This setting can either be programmed by way of the drive’s PM2 jumper, or it may be a user configurable firmware setting.

PUIS can be disabled with a tool such as HDAT2. HDAT2 must be launched with the /W option to wake up the drives. Another possible solution is “sudo hdparm -s0 /dev/ice”.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_tp-windows_install/build-9879-hard-drive-disaster-read-this/7da0cd97-3ebc-4eb3-ae23-9873672e4e6d?page=1