Question

A technician recently moved a workstation to a new desk. On startup, the OS boots normally from the NVMe drive, but a secondary SATA hard drive that stores project files no longer appears in the OS or in the UEFI/BIOS. Other drives are visible, and the system is otherwise stable. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The SATA data or power cable to the secondary drive was jostled loose during the move

Answer

The drive's file system became corrupted and needs to be reformatted

Answer

The motherboard's storage controller has failed completely

Answer

The UEFI boot order needs to be changed so the drive is recognized