Brand new TC-1760 won't boot after adding HDD

I just bought a TC-1760 icore5 12400 with a 500 gig Kensington SSD. Works super fast compared to my older Acer, but... I added a brand new Seagate 1Terabite Sata HDD for data storage, and the machine won't boot with it connected. I get the Acer logo and the spinning dots forever. If I leave the power connected and disconnect the SATA cable, it will boot. If I disconnect the power cable and leave the SATA cable connected it won't boot. If I do a hot connect after the machine is booted, the drive is not seen either. I tried the other SATA ports and no luck. I checked the bios and it's not there either. I can feel the drive spin up for about 5 secs when I try to boot the machine but then just the Acer logo, so I know the HDD is getting power. I can't find any bios setting where the SATA ports are disabled. I even disconnected the DVD drive and used that port, but the results are the same. I can't test the HDD in my old computer because it has different ports. I'm stumped. Does anyone have any ideas on this?

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Potownguy

Update... I hooked up the new HDD in another computer and the computer booted, the HDD spun up, bios did not see it, Windows 10 did see it. Used disk management to try and initialize the disk and create partition. No luck. Windows 10 reported an IO error. So I tried Mini Tool Partition wizard, and it reported a bad disk. I'm thinking I got a brand new Seagate Barracuda that is bad.

ttttt

@Potownguy

Your PC is so new. I tend to believe probably a future BIOS update will solve the problem if the HDD is not a bad one. If Win 10 Disk Management cannot initialize it with another PC, the HDD is probably a bad one anyway.

BTW, have you tried to connect an EXTERNAL HDD to the PC and see if the same type of old, spinning technology HDD will work with the new PC?

Potownguy

Thanks ttttt. I was pretty confident that the new HDD was faulty when my old PC wouldn't see it either. So I went out and bought the same Seagate Barricuda from the local BestBuy, installed it in the new PC and had the drive up and running in 5 minutes. That is what I expected with the first drive but thought that since I hadn't been inside a box for a few years, maybe I was missing something, especially since the first drive actually spun up. Thanks agiain for your answer, ttttt.

ttttt

@Potownguy

Glad to know things are working fine for you and thanks for reporting back.

Just wondering why you still use traditional HDD like the Seagate Barracuda, if not for higher capacity purpose? NVMe and 2.5" SATA3 SSDs have better performance and generally better reliabilities than mechanical HDD nowadays.

Potownguy

Hi ttttt. I'm old school. I don't agree that SSD's are more reliable than HDD's. I like having my operating system on an SSD for the quick boot, but not my data. I have had external SSD's fail and they were supposed to be my backup. In all my years of playing with computers I have had one hard drive failure. I have a Buffalo NAS drive that I have been using as a back up device as well, and it has been faithful to me for 10 years. And yes, the higher capacity plays a role as well.

ttttt

@Potownguy

I am old school too. From my multi-decades of PC experiences I had more than a couple dozens of mechanical HDD (including external USB HDD and server drives), a dozen of 2.5" SATA3 SSD and close to a dozen of M.2 NVMe SSD.

I used mobile docks for 3.5" HDD and 2.5" SATA SSD, and drives are used more evenly than other people. Through the years, there were four HDD failures, including WD and Seagate drives. In additional to that, currently, one 3TB Seagate Barracuda( less than 3000 operation hours) and one 500 GB WD Passport Edge (less than 2000 hours) have unrepairable bad sectors where Crystal Disk Info program gave me the yellow "Caution" health status. These cautioned drives will not be highly reliable for storing important data. On the other hand, none of the 2.5" SATA3 SSD and M.2 NVMe SSD failed on me so far. Only one two year old M.2 NVme SSD for one of the PC's primary booting has more than 10 TB written on it is indicated by Crystal Disk Info as 96% healthy. If the depletion rate is linear, then I would expect the drive to last two decades. Some 2.5" SATA3 SSD are approaching a decade age now.

Anyway, we have different experiences for drive usages. I am still a firm believer that SSDs are more reliable than mechanical HDD. More recent technologies should be better than the 2-3 decade old technologies.

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