PC crash followed by disappearance of solid-state drives only

My (self-built) Windows 10 PC recently crashed (while I was playing the game Ori & the Blind Forest) and upon restart could no longer boot as its 2 SSDs (one 18 month old 250gb Samsung 850 Evo, one 12 month old 1 tb Mushkin reactor), the Samsung one containing the OS, were no longer detected. The DVD drive and the HDD (2 tb hitachi) still were detected, however.

My first thought was that some kind of power malfunction had occurred that messed up the SSDs so I tried power cycling as described here but that did not get them to re-appear. To confirm it isn't an issue on my computer's side, I tried plugging the SSDs to the SATA cables/ports that had detected the DVD/HDD but no luck. Additionally, plugging the DVD/HDD into the SSD cables had them show up.

So that seems to suggest that the SSDs are more seriously broken & need to be replaced on warranty, ok no problem. In the meantime, I'll get a HDD to install windows on so I can use the computer without having to reformat the surviving HDD & lose its data. I took an HDD from an old but functioning computer (windows 7, 80 gb western digital HDD) and tried plugging it into mine... not detected. Now I'm pretty confused. To further muddle things, I tried sticking the SSDs into the older computer and it didn't seem to recognize the Samsung, but did recognize the Mushkin. Since I can only plug one drive into that computer at a time this was done in BIOS only, however.

Can anyone make sense of this puzzle? Based on my troubleshooting it's really unclear to me if the issue is the drives or something else in my computer (motherboard? I have an 18 month old asrock fatal1ty z97. BIOS seems to be working fine though. I have never updated the drivers unless that happens automatically, however). Is there further testing I should do?

In case it's relevant, the background of the crash is that my computer has been crashing occasionally for a good while. Potentially related, I've also noticed there seems to be a RAM leak sometimes and I have to restart to get it back because I haven't taken the time to figure out what's causing the problem. I previously fixed a similar issue by updating the network drivers. Don't know if that's what caused this particular crash but there it is.

So thanks for reading and any advice is really appreciated!

Submitted July 05, 2017 at 05:11AM by orgafoogie http://ift.tt/2sDUgmG