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DarkScythe
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2008
- Messages
- 367
Hello,
I want to see if anyone has any idea what may be wrong with my hard drive.
Last night I noticed that one of my hard drives was missing from the "My Computer" explorer.
I think it actually may have been gone for close to a week, but since it was only a data storage drive, I never noticed because I rarely access it.
In any case, it was missing, and that was worrying, so I decided to reboot to see if that fixed anything. Unfortunately, it didn't help. It was late, so I shut down the PC (it normally runs 24/7 doing various tasks) and deal with it today. It's currently in the freezer as I guess if that works, it'd be nice. I would like to know if anyone has any idea what is wrong with it though.
When I booted this morning (and last night when I discovered the issue) it took XP a lot longer than normal to boot up, I assume because it was trying to initialize the failed drive or something. XP does not seem to know it exists, nor does device manager or disk management. It was a SATA drive hooked up using AHCI (which means WD's Diagnostic tools are worthless since it apparently can't communicate with AHCI drives.)
Now, XP doesn't see it, but the BIOS kind of does. It's not listed in the actual BIOS, but during the startup routines when it scans the drives for AHCI, it detects that there are 6 ports and 6 devices connected, but it can only "find" 5 drives responding, and simply waits for the 6th until it times out and proceeds with the boot. After I pulled the offending drive, during this same process, it would now detect 6 ports and only 5 drives connected. This seems to indicate that it knows its there, but that it's just not responding or something.
I have a couple Icy Dock eSATA/USB enclosures, so I shut down the PC again and pulled out the drive into an enclosure. I hooked it up via USB to my laptop and turned it on. The laptop detected the enclosure and started attempting to set up the drivers, but again, the drive could not be found. This time though, device manager actually did pick up the drive and detected it properly as a WD5000AAKS, but that was the extent of its knowledge. It wouldn't assign it a drive letter for me to access the data. Disk management unfortunately still didn't see it.
I then switched it over to my PC, which booted normally after removing the failed drive, and turned it on via eSATA. At this point, event manager started giving me errors with the drive timing out, with a pause on my PC every time it timed out. At this point, I shut it down and tossed it into the freezer.
Prior to that though, I was trying to listen for any abnormalities while it was in the enclosure. It spun up just fine as far as I can tell, and I don't hear any clicking from it. Could it be an issue with the PCB on it?
There has been some annoyances before though, and the event log is filled with entries with errors and warnings about cache not being flushed to disk or something, but I can never figure out which drive it's referring to because the port numbers and drive letters don't match up to what's reported in the BIOS or whatnot. I think it's just time to upgrade all the drives with newer ones.
Either way, at this point I'm just going to try to recover what data I have on it and RMA the thing, but it would be nice to know wtf is wrong with it. I know people will say something along the lines of 'should've made backups.' Funny thing is I was in the middle of doing just that - I was busy sorting out all the data on my other active/download drives in preparation for copying everything on all my drives over to a 1.5TB drive I purchased specifically to hold a copy of all my data. Since this drive held static, long-term storage data, it was already sorted, and I never noticed it missing. I guess it's a kick in the nuts for me waiting too long to get going with my backups, but I can't really do anything about it now.
So - anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
I want to see if anyone has any idea what may be wrong with my hard drive.
Last night I noticed that one of my hard drives was missing from the "My Computer" explorer.
I think it actually may have been gone for close to a week, but since it was only a data storage drive, I never noticed because I rarely access it.
In any case, it was missing, and that was worrying, so I decided to reboot to see if that fixed anything. Unfortunately, it didn't help. It was late, so I shut down the PC (it normally runs 24/7 doing various tasks) and deal with it today. It's currently in the freezer as I guess if that works, it'd be nice. I would like to know if anyone has any idea what is wrong with it though.
When I booted this morning (and last night when I discovered the issue) it took XP a lot longer than normal to boot up, I assume because it was trying to initialize the failed drive or something. XP does not seem to know it exists, nor does device manager or disk management. It was a SATA drive hooked up using AHCI (which means WD's Diagnostic tools are worthless since it apparently can't communicate with AHCI drives.)
Now, XP doesn't see it, but the BIOS kind of does. It's not listed in the actual BIOS, but during the startup routines when it scans the drives for AHCI, it detects that there are 6 ports and 6 devices connected, but it can only "find" 5 drives responding, and simply waits for the 6th until it times out and proceeds with the boot. After I pulled the offending drive, during this same process, it would now detect 6 ports and only 5 drives connected. This seems to indicate that it knows its there, but that it's just not responding or something.
I have a couple Icy Dock eSATA/USB enclosures, so I shut down the PC again and pulled out the drive into an enclosure. I hooked it up via USB to my laptop and turned it on. The laptop detected the enclosure and started attempting to set up the drivers, but again, the drive could not be found. This time though, device manager actually did pick up the drive and detected it properly as a WD5000AAKS, but that was the extent of its knowledge. It wouldn't assign it a drive letter for me to access the data. Disk management unfortunately still didn't see it.
I then switched it over to my PC, which booted normally after removing the failed drive, and turned it on via eSATA. At this point, event manager started giving me errors with the drive timing out, with a pause on my PC every time it timed out. At this point, I shut it down and tossed it into the freezer.
Prior to that though, I was trying to listen for any abnormalities while it was in the enclosure. It spun up just fine as far as I can tell, and I don't hear any clicking from it. Could it be an issue with the PCB on it?
There has been some annoyances before though, and the event log is filled with entries with errors and warnings about cache not being flushed to disk or something, but I can never figure out which drive it's referring to because the port numbers and drive letters don't match up to what's reported in the BIOS or whatnot. I think it's just time to upgrade all the drives with newer ones.
Either way, at this point I'm just going to try to recover what data I have on it and RMA the thing, but it would be nice to know wtf is wrong with it. I know people will say something along the lines of 'should've made backups.' Funny thing is I was in the middle of doing just that - I was busy sorting out all the data on my other active/download drives in preparation for copying everything on all my drives over to a 1.5TB drive I purchased specifically to hold a copy of all my data. Since this drive held static, long-term storage data, it was already sorted, and I never noticed it missing. I guess it's a kick in the nuts for me waiting too long to get going with my backups, but I can't really do anything about it now.
So - anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
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