PC Building Help
 

My son and I thought it would be fun to try and build our own gaming PC. We based it off the suggestions from the PC Master Race builds on reddit. We finally got all the parts and have hit a snag. Everything is in the case and I can boot to the BIOS but for the life of me, I can't get it to recognize the drive. The only thing we changed from the 'End All' build was to get a 3TB drive instead of a 1TB drive.

Can anybody think of anything that might limit the recognition of the drive. I read a few things that would suggest I might have to upgrade the BIOS to get the 3TB drive recognized.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Do you have an external enclosure you can test the HDD with on another computer? It might be you got a hard drive that was DOA. If the HDD drive works on another computer, you might then have a bad SATA cable. If you have a newer motherboard, then a 3TB should not be an issue.

Did you check the boot order? Sometimes there is weird stuff in the BIOS that might be trying to boot other devices before the disl.

I was just able to put another HDD into the new case and it fired right up. I'm starting to think DOA but one video did say that I might have to upgrade the BIOS which quite honestly, terrifies me a bit as I understand I could brick the board if I screw it up.

What's the motherboard in question? Upgrading the BIOS is a pretty common thing. Definitely nothing to worry about.

It's a Gigabyte Z97X-SLI. I'm taking a shot at updating now.

I second what cartman said about trying to boot it onto another system to check it.

This is one of the best tools in my box.

Was the drive that worked less than 3TB?

Yes, the drive I put in was only 750GB. I've got the whole thing running at this point, just with the smaller drive. The graphics are awesome. Now I just need to figure out if the 3T drive was just DOA.

Can you hear it spinning at all? I tend to agree with cartman in that newer motherboards shouldn't have an issue with a large drive like that.

You can kinda hear it try to spin up but it's more like two sputters and nothing else.