Goddamned hard disk troubles

LaCabra

I just recently procured an 80GB Maxtor hard disk, and it's behaving strangely. First few days I had it it was fine, but now every time I boot, I can read the data on it and copy things over to it just fine for a while, then it disappears entirely. I don't get any messages, just My Computer and Disk Management stop seeing it and anything I had transferring to it suddenly tells me that E:\whatever refers to a location that doesn't exist. If I reboot it's back, but later on it isn't anymore.

First noticed this when I booted up the PC in the morning and everything was there, came home at the end of the day and couldn't find some data on the offending disk.

I'm running Windows Vista, but I don't think that'd be it.

Is my disk just fucked, or is there something I can do?

Zifnab

Are you sure it's not a power issue? I had too many devices chained on one power lead at one point and the drive at the end would randomly power down on its own. In my case it was my system drive, so everything would crash, but I can see a second hard drive being able to shut down without bringing down the system.

LaCabra

That's a point. I've got a 400W PSU that came with my case, and have 3 hard disks hooked up as well as a 6800GS. Could that be it?

vonPoonBurGer

LaCabra wrote:

That's a point. I've got a 400W PSU that came with my case, and have 3 hard disks hooked up as well as a 6800GS. Could that be it?

400W ought to be enough, assuming the PSU is providing clean, stable power. There are a bunch of PSU calculators online that you can use to estimate how many watts you need. The one I use regularily is http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp. Assuming your system is fairly average aside from having 3 hard drives, and that your power supply isn'y dodgy, I don't think power is the issue.

Zifnab

400W seems like it should be enough for what you have, but I would recommend opening the case and following the power leads around from the PSU onward. I've found that no matter how much power the PSU can put out, if you have too many devices on one lead from the PSU itself, you can have issues. Make sure the video card is pretty much on its own, maybe with a floppy drive or something, and try to space the HDDs out across two separate leads, if possible. That might help the problem.

Ruckus

I already PM'd him this but you can also go into the BIOS settings and enable SMART monitoring. If the drive is dying sometimes the SMART subsystem will alert Windows via popups and/or System Log entries.