On 2020-10-22 19:45, VanguardLH wrote:
bad sector wrote:

After I don't know how many reboots bios still wasn't detecting
but "fdisk -l" finally picked one of them up.

fdisk? I haven't see that available since the ancient MS/IBM-DOS days,
or in Linux. What OS are you running on this computer?

I'm just starting out with ssd's and gdisk after using fdisk like
for 30 years. It's more gdisk now, especially if I partition, but
for just the odd "fsdisk -l" I still forget myself at times

OS-wise its Suse Leap, Suse Tumbleweed, morphing over to
systemd-free Artix, Devuan and Slackware while on ocasion
runing w7 in a vBox on either of the above.

I'm not sure the OS is important since the problems you describe are
accessing the BIOS or its POST screen not listing all your devices. The
POST screen presents its findings before any OS gets loaded.

Do you even see the POST screen? Or is the BIOS configured to display
some ad banner, like "Hey, you're using ASUS"? I'd get rid of any ad
banner display during boot up, and have the BIOS show its POST screen.
The ad banner is worthless. The POST screen shows valuable information.

I can config the bios no problem, usually nix all the
useless eye-candy. My problems with the bios were
that "A" hitting 'Del' with the new keyboard was a waste
of time and "B" one of my drives was probably done for.

There's one question left here before being certain,
If you have a bad drive plugged into slot 3 that don't
get recognised, will that prevent a good drive in slot 4
from being recognised. This bit is a mystery, I was
getting that impression though. Now I'll never know
cause I coincidentally killed the 'bad' drive (see other
answer to Paul).