His heart sank. A defective drive? He reseated the cables. Nothing. Then he remembered a forum post from 2019: Some SATA ports share bandwidth with M.2 slots.
He checked the motherboard manual. Buried on page 1-8: "When an M.2 device is installed in M.2_1, SATA ports 5 and 6 are disabled." how to add another drive to pc
He needed another drive. Not a replacement. An addition. His heart sank
A month later, a Black Friday sale caught his eye: 1TB NVMe drive, $45. He bought it, slid it into that empty M.2 slot, and spent 45 minutes looking for a screwdriver small enough for the retaining screw. He learned that adding a second drive is easy. Finding the right screw? That’s the real PC building challenge. Nothing
He moved the SATA data cable to port #2. Rebooted into BIOS. And there it was: ST2000DM008-2FR102 . A digital heartbeat. He saved and exited.
Now, a black bar labeled "Unallocated." The raw, empty void of 2 terabytes.