A few comments to your points.
1. He's stated these were replacement drives which means that at least one of them worked on that PC before so there should be no issue with them being too "new" (which I'm not sure what you implying by too new). If a drive utilized some interface protocol that wasn't supported on that system it wouldn't change in the same model from one drive to another.
2. If the drive was not formatted completely, meaning a low level format, I'd be shocked that the manufacturer would send it out that way. He also stated that he's had the issue with 4 drives so I assume the drives were installed and working for some time so it's not a formatting issue.
3. He also stated he tried the drives in an external enclosure which also eliminates the issue being a bios boot order. Additionally since it was used for some time in the system that would imply the bios is already set to boot from the correct drive.
In the past I have encountered brand new sealed drives that required a BIOS update to be seen by the pc, not for some years though. Regarding formatting, also had this issue. As I said earlier, think this may have been around ME / XP time. |Never had an issue in recent times, even with SSD's. On the 3rd point, yes in an external casing the pc should see the drive. Until I read the latest post above, I didn't realise they installed correctly and then went bad, which is my bad.
I just want to comment on the last few posts. The drives all worked for 30ish days and then stopped. It's not a boot order issue, the drives CAUSE THE BIOS TO NOT POST. Please understand that means it simply will not boot from any media at all any time.
I find this very strange. I've never known a 2ndary drive to cause a PC to fail to boot. Usually the PC just boots and the only way you know the drive has failed and isn't there, is by it's absence in the My PC view / hard drive maps. Equally, I can't think of any reason why it would stop the pc from booting from other media. A secondary drive has nothing to do with the Boot table, Windows, or boot process. Any recovery media will have it's own boot table and OS. I suppose it could be some kind of hardware check and halt by the Motherboard but never known it for a non windows hard drive. Have you tried contacting the Motherboard manufacturer to see if there's any such check / halt process?
Probably a long shot, but have you also checked for malware / viruses? The fact it happens every 30 days also seems suspicious timing. I'd recommend downloading Malwarebytes Chameleon and running that (as it kills processes that otherwise block antivirus / anti-malware softwares). It should take care of any malign processes and then scan your pc with Malwarebytes. After that I'd also run an AV program for double safety as Malwarebytes is more malware than virus focused as a whole, and then Spybot as it picks up some of the more minor issues some of the others don't.
Only other thing I could think of is a heat issue in the external casing, but again the 30 day timing worries me. Why would every drive fail after exactly the same time period? That is very out of the ordinary.
