My Second Hard Drive Disappered!

aramp1

aramp1

Member
Okay, something weird has just happened. I got up this morning and noticed that one of my hard drives is missing. It’s still there and plugged in. The BIOS shows that it is still there, but when I go into my computer, it isn’t there.

Here’s a little history. I built this computer a little over a year ago. I’m running windows XP Pro with SP2. I’ve got the OS and most of my programs on a WD Raptor which is SATA. Then, I’ve got a 200 Gig WD SATA hard drive that I’ve got all my pictures and files on. This is the drive that’s missing. I’ve also got another WD 200 Gig drive that’s IDE that I have all my music on. This one is fine.

Here’s what I’ve done so far. I’ve tried unplugging it and restarting the computer. I then plug it back in and restart again. No luck. I then tried re-adding the drive, but then the computer locks up. I’ve tried plugging it into another SATA slot and I’ve used another SATA cable with no luck.

Is my drive fried?
 
It sounds like something in Windows itself may have been cooked. I hope you are not putting the WD Raptor on the master or secondary SATA along with the other drive. XP has a touchy problem at times with SATA drives and being able to even see them unless the drivers are in good.

A failed drive is always possible. But don't rule out a few other things even a fault that has come up with the board itself since you have tried using other cables. Hopefully it will be a simple resource sharing problem with XP. If you can someone else try the drive in another case and it shows up in Windows then you know it's software not hardware.
 
PC eye said:
It sounds like something in Windows itself may have been cooked. I hope you are not putting the WD Raptor on the master or secondary SATA along with the other drive. XP has a touchy problem at times with SATA drives and being able to even see them unless the drivers are in good.

A failed drive is always possible. But don't rule out a few other things even a fault that has come up with the board itself since you have tried using other cables. Hopefully it will be a simple resource sharing problem with XP. If you can someone else try the drive in another case and it shows up in Windows then you know it's software not hardware.
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No, the hard drive isn't the slave to the raptor. I've ruled out the board because I plugged another drive into the same slot and it worked fine. I haven't tried my hard drive in another computer yet, but I've got a feeling it will do the same thing. I'm probably going to end up sending it to one of those data recovery places. They're expensive, but I want my pictures. Like they say, "Education is expensive". I think I'm about to buy some. I should have backed everything up. I'm going to start.
 
check the partitions in disk management, make sure the partition wasnt accidentally deleted. thats the only reason i can think of that it would show up in the bios (which should let it show up in disk management) but not under my computer.
 
I'm going to harp here again. It's not Windows. That's just dumb. It's not the board. It's WD. They are famous for crap like this. That's why I hate them so much. They turf the MFT on them, or they go *click click click*. In this case I will bet it's the first one, especially considering as how the BIOS can detect it, but My Computer can't.

If you go into compmgmt.msc, you will probably see the drive sitting there, but with diagonal lines through it. If you do, that means I was right.
 
It doesn't show up under disk management. I can use the "add new hardware" function and (re)add it, but after I do, the computer locks up. I think I've basically narrowed it down to the drive being bad. It will still spin when I power the computer up, but it won't make any noise at all. I think that this will be the last western digital product I purchase.
 
You can pretty much count on that puppy being cooked, that's for sure.

Before you do anything though, give something a try. I don't think it will work, but you really should rule it out just in case. Check out the following link and follow the instructions:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/show_hidden_devices_in_device_manager.htm (I really like that site).

Then go into the device manager and show hidden devices. You will see the drive show up in the list kind of faded.

Uninstall the device. Try and plug the drive back in and see what happens. It might work, you never know.

If it doesn't, take the piece of shit apart and cover it in shrink wrap so you can show all your buddies what an HDD looks like inside. I think I might have one around here myself somewhere. At least I used to have at least one.
 
aramp1 said:
It doesn't show up under disk management. I can use the "add new hardware" function and (re)add it, but after I do, the computer locks up. I think I've basically narrowed it down to the drive being bad. It will still spin when I power the computer up, but it won't make any noise at all. I think that this will be the last western digital product I purchase.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't give up on WD and then go out and by some Maxtor piece of crap. You may see good results with a Seagate or IBM over those. I was forced to load out one good WD drive dual OSed some months back when XP couldn't see a 200gb SATA drive while it was clearly seen in the bios and post screen. A friend there never did anything about it. Have you tried it without the Raptor drive on the same controller to see if it works there? That would point at the board having a fault.
 
PC eye said:
I wouldn't give up on WD and then go out and by some Maxtor piece of crap. You may see good results with a Seagate or IBM over those. I was forced to load out one good WD drive dual OSed some months back when XP couldn't see a 200gb SATA drive while it was clearly seen in the bios and post screen. A friend there never did anything about it. Have you tried it without the Raptor drive on the same controller to see if it works there? That would point at the board having a fault.
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aramp1 said:
Here’s what I’ve done so far. I’ve tried unplugging it and restarting the computer. I then plug it back in and restart again. No luck. I then tried re-adding the drive, but then the computer locks up. I’ve tried plugging it into another SATA slot and I’ve used another SATA cable with no luck.
Click to expand...

When you buy yourself a set of glasses you can come back and read that he's already tried another drive... If the BIOS sees it, it's not the mobo obviously. :rolleyes:
 
Aramp1: By the way, WD really is nothing but shit. I've said it many times before in this forum. Since 1999 when I was a Western Digital Authorized Reseller until present I have seen TONS of WD. I figure I have gone through over 1000 harddrives total in that time period. I have lost more WD than any other brand other than Fujitsu. They are even worse than Connor for reliability (I don't know if you remember them). I have seen a failure rate of roughly 30%. Terrible. The Caviar and the Caviar SE are absolute crap. The Raptor is really nice, and the Caviar RE is an enterprise drive... But other than that I would stay the hell away from them unless you are using them for casual usage only. They just can't take the pressure.

The drives I have had good luck with are Seagate, Maxtor (except for three models in the early 2000's. If you need the model numbers let me know), Samsung and some Hitachis. IBM makes a few good ones too.
 
SirKenin said:
When you buy yourself a set of glasses you can come back and read that he's already tried another drive... If the BIOS sees it, it's not the mobo obviously. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Besides a failed drive you seem to miss something else like a now "inactive" partition that will not appear in Windows. With the latest dual boot with RC1 a rather interesting thing happened that could point that out. Suddenly the NTFS storage partition at the back end of the secondary is now invisible to the XP host drive while the Vista beta version being run on the secondary has full access.

Something made that partition suddenly inactive to XP. This is one thing brought up about using a live Linux distro on cd to access the partitions and drives that become inaccessible. With a spare drive lying around you could also drop RC1 on that real fast to replace the host drive to see if the files on the drives could be rescued before spending on a recovery service. The cost is a black disk if you already have the BurnOn freeware that does a good job.
 
Blah blah blah.

It's not an inactive partition either. If you were with us during the entire discussion you would notice that the drive doesn't even appear in computer management. That means it has nothing to do with the partition, because even an unpartitioned harddrive shows up in computer management.

You'll also notice that when he tries to add the harddrive the computer crashes. That is an excellent sign of a toasted harddrive.
 
SirKenin said:
Blah blah blah.
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That's about your usual there alright. Sorry I just don't have an interpreter onhand for that dialect. :P

The one thing so far "no one" has even thought about is a possible need for replacing the SATA cable itself? Gee? Could a bad cable screw up the works? :confused:
 
SirKenin said:
The BIOS detects the drive for Pete's sakes :rolleyes:

Geez, get with the program man.
Click to expand...

That doesn't always mean that a drive is seen in Windows as well. Ive had to reinstall Windows at times due to cable problem while the bios clearly showed the drive there. All the bios sees is the make, model, and type IDed by the chip on the drive's controller card.

That still doesn't show whether the read heads and platters are good or bad and if the drive is partitioned and formatted or simply blank. Trying a different cable to rule it out there is part of the entire troubleshooting process.
 
aramp1:

I did some searching for you. First, I have never seen a drive demonstrate those characteristics from a bad cable. I found ONE guy on the internet that claims he has had all kinds of issues due to a bad cable, but the BIOS still detected the drive. However, there was no substantiating evidence on Google that I could find, and I tried several different searches.

That's not to say it's absolutely not a bad cable, but I found no references to a bad cable on Google at all. Not one. There is only one of two things that happens. The connector jostles loose and needs to be reseated, or the drive needs to be unplugged and plugged back in. If those two don't solve the problem it is safe to say that the drive is cooked. I would certainly try those two things. I found several references to that effect in my search.
 
Google? Gee? At least I use combined search engines and still have to use MSN often.

You wouldn't see this being mentioned so much due to the big differences between ide and SATA cables themselves. If anything at this point you would most likely hear about a bad ribbon not SATA type cable seeing problems like this. For the most part ide drives have always been the host drives while SATA/RAID and even SCSI setups were primarily used for fast access types of storage drives(except some old IBM systems apparently).
 
I thought you didn't search the internet? Hmmm. I'll have to remember that post for when this comes up again. I do remember you saying that when I called you Mr. Google.. The more you speak...
 
SirKenin said:
I thought you didn't search the internet? Hmmm. I'll have to remember that post for when this comes up again. I do remember you saying that when I called you Mr. Google.. The more you speak...
Click to expand...

I never said I didn't conduct searches. You will just never what specifically is being sought. I find it far better running better running several not just the one search engine that you seem to have a constant reference to. That other item for looking at drives wasn't found there.

Meanwhile speaking of Google I thought this was just right for you. :P http://blogs.officezealot.com/marc/archive/2003/12/26/2186.aspx Google Deskbar.
 
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