Troubleshooting A Faulty SATA Port – How To Test and Fix It

Troubleshooting a faulty SATA port on a motherboard is fairly easy – if you realize that the port may be the issue. Bad SATA port symptoms are varied and may be intermittent or seemingly random.

The symptoms can also be very similar to those caused by other hardware and software issues. Unless you pin down the cause of the problem, it’s difficult to be sure if any ‘repair’ has worked – or if the problem will return in a few days…

A perfect example of this is an issue I saw recently in my computer repair business – it turned out to be caused by a faulty SATA port on the motherboard.

I’ll explain below how I troubleshooted and fixed it – it reinforces the need to have a logical approach and not to become so blinded by the ‘most common’ causes that you fail to consider rarer alternatives.

Bad Sata Port (or Cable) Symptoms

The most common symptoms are the easiest to diagnose and are very similar to a hard drive failure:

  • The hard drive is not found – it is not shown in BIOS and/or you see ‘No operating system found’ message at startup so Windows will not load.

In this case the problem is likely to be a faulty hard drive or SATA cable or else the port itself (the SATA controller) is bad. See the next section for ways to test which of the three is the cause.

But the symptoms are not always so obvious, as a PC that I worked on recently shows – it was 4 years old and worked fine most of the time but suffered from:

  • Occasional blue screen of death (BSOD) crashes
  • Random long freezes – sometimes followed by an automatic shut down and restart

These issues had been getting worse for 6 months and now averaged about once a day – but with no pattern as to how long the PC was on for or what software was in use at the time…

All these types of error can be caused by a hardware or a software problem – and, being intermittent, they’re not easy to troubleshoot.

Diagnosing An Intermittent Faulty SATA Port

I first backed up all the important documents and files – really important if hardware failure is suspected e.g. if a hard drive is dying then testing it might just finish it off…

1.  I checked Event Viewer, looking particularly at the System logs for relevant errors. Several errors typically relate to memory (RAM) faults so I tested the memory – no faults found. (If the problem was not so intermittent I could have just swapped out the RAM to test it)

2.  Other errors in the logs typically relate to hard drive faults – although they could also have been due to all those unexpected shutdowns corrupting the Windows file system. As the PC was 4 years old I tested the hard drive to see if it was failing – no faults found.

3.  A faulty PSU (Power Supply Unit) can also cause random freezing and restarts so I tested it under full load – no faults found.

4.  Overheating can also cause such issues so I tested the temperatures of the main components using Speccy – all within normal limits Then I stress tested the PC – no faults found. Grrr…

troubleshooting a faulty sata port

Further Troubleshooting

So far I had established that the hard drive, RAM, PSU and temperatures were all fine – there were no other separate components (like a graphics card) so this narrowed down the cause to an intermittent motherboard or SATA port or SATA cable fault – or software errors.

The biggest issue was not being able to reproduce the error – even under stress testing the PC had remained resolutely stable with no crashes or freezing.

Unless I could find a ‘smoking gun’ I couldn’t justify the time needed to update drivers/software, and certainly not the cost of replacing the motherboard or writing off the PC – I needed to make this PC crash!

  • My experience pointed me towards heavy file read/write access causing related memory and hard drive issues, hence the crashes/freezing…
  • So I ran a full virus scan (also useful to rule out viruses) which would read/check every file but it found no issues – and still no crash.
  • Finally I decided to do a full disk cleanup – it froze half way through and the PC shut down!
  • To make sure, I tried a few disk cleanups in both normal and safe mode and the PC froze up every time.

At last I could reproduce the problem at will so I could be confident if a repair was successful.

Successful Repair

First I tried a new SATA cable for the hard drive – disk cleanup still crashed.

I then moved the hard drive SATA cable to a different SATA port on the motherboard – and disk cleanup finished successfully :-)

I repeated the test by trying a few disk cleanups in both normal and safe mode and they were successful every time – no freezes at all.

As a final check, I moved the SATA cable back to the original port on the motherboard and, sure enough, disk cleanup started failing again – proving for certain that particular SATA port was bad. Job done!

How to Fix Faulty SATA Port on Motherboard

Realistically you can’t fix a bad SATA port, only work around it – the SATA controller is an integral part of the motherboard. So if you have a laptop, sadly you’re out of luck – it will likely need manufacturer repair or replacement of the motherboard.

But in a PC you can work around it, as the Repair section above shows – if you have a spare SATA port, move the hard drive SATA cable to use that instead and all should be well. If the SATA cable itself is faulty, replace it with a new one.

If you only have 2 ports and both are in use (1 for a hard drive and 1 for a DVD drive), unplug the DVD drive and use that SATA port for the hard drive instead. If you really need a working DVD drive you can buy a cheap external USB DVD rewriter.

What If All Motherboard SATA Ports Are Faulty?

This is more likely if you have an older PC with only 2 ports. Possible solutions include:

1. If you have a free PCI-e slot, add new SATA ports by installing an internal card to add 4 internal SATA ports. Note that you may need to reinstall Windows to get such ports working for use with the system (Windows) hard drive.

2. Replace the motherboard.

3. Buy a new PC – note that as long as the SATA hard drive itself is not faulty, you could reuse it in a new PC. Or retrieve your data from it and use it as an external USB hard drive by buying an external USB SATA hard drive enclosure. You need a 3.5 inch enclosure for a standard size PC hard drive or a 2.5 inch enclosures for laptop and SSD drives.

Conclusion

In my example, the SATA port (disk controller) on the motherboard was faulty – but only intermittently and under heavy disk activity.

This is a rare outcome – the usual symptoms of a faulty SATA port are that the hard drive is not recognized in BIOS or Windows does not load, producing disk read errors or a ‘no operating system found’ message.

It underlines the importance of thorough step by step testing – and being able to reproduce a fault so that you can test if a potential fix actually works, otherwise you’re just shooting in the dark…

13 thoughts on “Troubleshooting A Faulty SATA Port – How To Test and Fix It”

  1. +1
    “One of the most frustrating things in computer repair is an intermittent (seemingly random) fault.”

    Just figured this out on a HP Z420 that has to use two disks- one for RHEL system, one for /home to run proprietary software. Seemingly random instances of ‘read error’, ‘no system files on disk’…… but disk would pass the tests. Once it booted it would run fine but booting was wildly problematic. Fortunately the Z420 has a bunch of SATA ports and moving to another port seemed to have fixed it. Many hours of frustration looking through BIOS & Grub.

  2. RE: “Freezing the hard drive” this was once suggested to me by a friend who had spent many years working at Hewlett Packard – this suggestion is for older drives – something to do with loose bearings (?) – I recently used this process to save the data from an old Seagate (ST31000340AS) that had gone south.

    • @TFDerrick – cool (literally!), nice to know that saved the day :-)

      For anyone else, it is best used as a (very) last resort if all else fails and can only help in specific circumstances – e.g. where the drive rapidly overheats due to wear/failure so freezing it can hold the temperature down long enough to recover data.

  3. I have the same problem,i got a new sata hard disk,but in my case even if i use any of the 2 sata ports i wont be able to boot.( along with tickling sounds from hard disk). and get the DISK READ ERROR.. i tried to load the operating system using the IDE PORT through other hard drive and it was successful..!! is there any way to solve the sata inerface problem?

    • @Surya – ticking/clicking sounds from drive sounds like a dead hard drive – it’s known as the ‘click of death’. Are you 100% certain it’s not the drive which is faulty – even a new one can be faulty? Test it on another PC as it sounds like a problem with the drive, not the ports.

      However, if SATA drive is definitely ok but both SATA ports on the motherboard are faulty then you can either 1. buy a PCI Express SATA card to add new SATA ports (if you have a spare PCIx socket else a PCI SATA card) 2. use IDE instead or 3. buy new motherboard

  4. As Alfred says, “Why didn’t I come across this article…”. Luckily all I did was throw away a probably perfectly good SATA cable. My PC had the symptoms as mentioned in the conclusion. The hard drive was intermittently not recognized in BIOS or Windows does not load, producing a disk read error or ‘no operating system found’ message. The computer has two hard drives and only two SATA ports so what to do? I purchased a cheap PCIe SATA card and thanks to Jmicron all now well again without the expense of a new motherboard. :)

  5. Today we had this issue and we could reach the same conclusion. At least we could indentify two SATA ports that allow the system to work. Not sure for how many time more…

    • In some cases the new port works ok for years but in other cases it may also fail within a few weeks/months – depends on how/where the motherboard is at fault.

      Hope you’re lucky and the new ports stay ok – do keep a good full backup just in case

      • Until the new pc arrives we are working with 2 HD’s , after, this motherboard will be retired.
        It is a GA-H67MA-UD2H, 1.5 years old only.
        Thank you,
        Our best regards from Brazil.

  6. I have the same problem, but I interchange my connections to the motherboard each time and BINGO…It works. I reuse the 4 SATA ports continuously each time.
    It’s not a regular occurence, but it does often happen. The ports are not faulty, the hard drive just doesn’t jive with the moterboard sometimes……I’m guessing.

    • That’s odd, if you reuse all the sata ports it suggests none of them are at fault – I would certainly change your SATA cable in case the end connecting to the mobo isn’t a great fit and works slightly loose over time (then is ok when pushed in firmly on another SATA port – for a while)

      SATA connectors are a poor design as the plastic end expands/softens over time to produce a bad connection – for that reason there is a limit on the number of times you can plug it in too, I think it’s about 50? I’ve had to replace several that looked ok but didn’t actually plug in firmly enough, leading to intermittent disk errors.

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