Case of the Vanishing Harddrive - Help!

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CHAoS_NiNJA

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 26, 2005
Messages
1,577
Ok, so this is REALLY annoying.

O run three drives, my 74GB OS drive, 320GB Game install drive and a 750GB storage drive. For the last few weeks, my 320GB drive has randomly been "vanishing", completely disappearing from Windows. Not in My Computer, not under Disk Management, just *gone*. On reboot, sometimes it won't even show up on my boot menu/BIOS, with one or both of my other drives doing the same. It takes a cold boot for them to be visable again.

What the hell is this? Its not just the 320GB drive, as my others can do the same on reboot...I've looked this happening before and it involves disk not spinning up in time when powered down from disuse to save power, but I've disabled disk spin-down and it still happens. This is a very strange and VEEEERY annoying problem, can anyone help me out?

EDIT: To clarify, this is in General Hardware and not Storage Systems as its more likely a mobo problem then drive issue.
 
sounds like the drive controller is flaking out, or maybe your PSU is having issues? you can try switching ports if it is a sata, or cable, or an external powered enclosure (which is generally useful for transporting data). With an external you can power it on or off at will to bring it back. but if the cable swaps don't work i'd start backing up data.
 
I'd try a different PSU first. I had a similar issue where I was pushing the PSU a little too hard. Trying to boot all the drives at once would pull barely too much power, even though I could read/write all 3 drives simultaneously without issue once(/if) the system was up and running.

If you don't have a PSU handy, try disconnecting the game or storage drive (or both) and see if you can boot 2 consistently without a problem.
 
Well the thing is I can *always* boot all of them unless its a quick restart. On a cold boot, all drives will always come up, and eventually only the 320GB will vanish. I doubt my PSu is being stressed as this Corsair 650W is a beast and I've seen then run 2xHD5970s and i7s with watercooling....I have but a single HD5870, I'm not near maxing out the PSU. I wouldn' rule out the PSU completely (had a couple power outages and such semi-recently) but its not my first choice.

The drive controller sounds most likely, but what the hell can I even do about that?
 
I had a similar issue early this year with a WD Green drive. When my system would come out of standby, my storage drive would be gone. It ended up being a hidden, if I remember correctly, "autorun.inf" file on the root of my storage drive. Got rid of the file, problem solved so far.
 
I don't have a file like that....and like I said, if i warm reboot, I can't see it at my boot up, and sometimes my 750 will be gone as well.
 
Anyone? I'm running the latest BIOS from Gigabyte, the one thats run on it for a couple years now, but it is listed as a "beta" BIOs on the site.
 
CHAoS_NiNJA said:
The drive controller sounds most likely, but what the hell can I even do about that?
Click to expand...

Get a new motherboard, RMA your motherboard, or an add-on storage controller are definitely options.

Anyway, try the "missing" hard drives in another PC and see if that PC exhibits the same behavior with those hard drives. Though it really looks like the storage controller is faulty.
 
I attempted to switch from IDE to AHCI mode (something I should have done awhile ago anyway) and things went smoothly until, again, that drive. Windows instantly picked up a boatload of errors and attempted to repair them, but in the end to drive came up as needed to be formatted. I did a quick format, rebooted, and now the drive is *never* shown in Windows, although appears in the AHCI boot screen.

After this...I'm actually thinking it *is* the drive after all, and its problems caused problems with my 750GB drive showing as well over a quick boot. Regardless, the drive isn't usable, so its time to be replaced and pray thats the problem.

Figures too, I just installed BFBC2 on it and wasn't able to de-reg it....theres one less install in my pool of 10... :p Not to mention all the other games installed on it, now 7 thinks I still have them installed and can't seem to remove them...welp, looks like its format time. :(
 
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