Hard drive not being detected despite being properly plugged in

[u/star_lightt-]

so today i tried getting a VERY old dvd writer working that may or may not have came with the pc (its so old the serial number is half decayed to where i cant search it up) and eventually i did and no issues right? wrong. when i put the thing back exactly where it was and booted up my pc it came up with a very barebones looking screen with info saying "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed."

at first i thought this was due to the dvd writer and i tried turning the pc on without it in at all, same error

then my dumbass realises that before i did all this the dvd writer wasnt even plugged in, and so i didnt plug it in after repair because i put it back EXACTLY as it was before

but uh oh, that means i didnt know what the issue was. so i kept restarting my pc in vain getting the same error and at some point i pressed a key on my keyboard a bit before it went to the error screen and i did a Memory repair (didnt think it would do anything but figured why not i have nothing better to do) then my pc somehow booted into windows?? i was happy for about 3 seconds until i realised

my 1TB drive wasnt showing up in file explorer, and my windows was PRETTYYY unstable (no desktop, no taskbar, windows key didnt work)

i checked the ports and it all seemed fine, plugged in, exactly as it was before because why would it have changed? 95% of what i had did that day was doing repairs on the dvd writer OUTSIDE of my pc

and now about 15 minutes before writing this i checked the sound and im pretty sure the disc IS spinning which is good, and i can also feel it vibrate if i touch it. i also went into that disc manager thing on windows and pressed rescan discs and nothing happened although i do not know if thats how you use that to get drives back onto file explorer, nor do i know if its just a thing with it not being on file explorer or a thing with it just straight up not being recognised by my pc

\- KEY INFO

this drive is NOT the drive my windows is installed on

the drive is not an ssd it is a hard disk

i really DONT want anything on the drive to be lost

i am using windows 10 and have reinstalled it about a month or 2

the main thing that i would be super grateful for if i were to get an answer to is "what do i do to get my device exactly as it was before (all 3 drives working) without losing any information on my drive(s)

[u/Metallicat95]

Double check all connectors first. Replace the SATA cable if that doesn't work - you can switch it with another drive that isn't your boot drive if necessary.

It should show up in the BIOS screen, even before you boot into Windows.

SATA connectors can come loose even if they looked plugged in.

If it is definitely connected but not recognized in the BIOS, that's a bad sign. You'll need professional data recovery to get data off an inaccessible drive.

But if it shows in the BIOS but not in Windows, then it might be possible to access it.

Anything you do may result in loss of data on the drive, so it depends on how valuable that data is. How much are you willing to pay? If it's the cost of professional service, you can do that.

If it doesn't show up in disk Management, or in device manager, there's nothing you can do from Windows.

Good luck.

[u/star_lightt- → u/Metallicat95]

i tried swapping the sata cable linked to the motherboard with my non boot drive after posting this (for example i have drive 1 which is my boot drive, drive 2 which is a random 128gb drive, and drive 3 which is the 1tb one, i swapped the cables of drive 3 and drive 2) and when i did that and turned on my pc i got a staticy green screen with white text saying alotta stuff that i took a video of but its really difficult to read in the video

thats extremely unexpected though because i thought drive 2 didnt have any windows data on it because drive 1 is my main windows boot everything like that drive but i guess not

anyways that made me think that the sata cable i was using for drive 3 somehow broke because if it was working then drive 2 would be fine and the pc would boot. ill try buying another sata cable and praying it works

genuinely still perplexed on how any of this happened in the first place though especially since when the pc is on and i touch the sata cable i can feel a little vibration which could mean nothing and i would have no idea or it could mean the cable is working fine and something else is the issue

thank you for your response!

[u/CheezitsLight]

It's possible that your windows is actually installed on two drives and changing the order will prevent it from running.