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Hard Drive disappears after computer has been running for a few minutes
Hensler
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So you guys have saved me a lot of trial and error before, so I'm hoping somebody's got an idea for my latest strange PC problem.
I've got 2 Western Digital 500gb hard drives, each about 80% full, and with a single partition on each. And recently I've been having some odd errors - freezing, a pixelated screen followed by a BSoD, and my computer is taking FOREVER to boot up. A week ago, it failed to detect any hard drives on a boot up, and was asking for a system disc. I restarted after that, and everything was fine.
But now after I've been running Windows for a few minutes, my second HDD disappears from my computer and disk management. I can't get to it through a command prompt and it never pops back up, as if the HDD has been removed. When I restart, which takes about 15 minutes now, HDD2 is in My Computer, but then disappears again.
When I go to the BIOS, I can see both hard drives on SATA channel 1 and SATA channel 6. If it were just the HDD missing, I'd think that I had a bad drive. But with all the other problems, I'm thinking it's a bad motherboard.
Anybody got any ideas about what I should try:?:
I've got 2 Western Digital 500gb hard drives, each about 80% full, and with a single partition on each. And recently I've been having some odd errors - freezing, a pixelated screen followed by a BSoD, and my computer is taking FOREVER to boot up. A week ago, it failed to detect any hard drives on a boot up, and was asking for a system disc. I restarted after that, and everything was fine.
But now after I've been running Windows for a few minutes, my second HDD disappears from my computer and disk management. I can't get to it through a command prompt and it never pops back up, as if the HDD has been removed. When I restart, which takes about 15 minutes now, HDD2 is in My Computer, but then disappears again.
When I go to the BIOS, I can see both hard drives on SATA channel 1 and SATA channel 6. If it were just the HDD missing, I'd think that I had a bad drive. But with all the other problems, I'm thinking it's a bad motherboard.
Anybody got any ideas about what I should try:?:
Hensler on
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You could also, just for kicks, try switching around the sata ports. Plug each hard drive into a different slot, see if that helps at all.
Okay, that's what I'm going to try tomorrow.
What's the best way to figure out if I'm drawing too much power? Just disconnect some unnecessary things and see if the problem persists? I'm doubtful that it is a power issue - I've had this same hardware setup for 2 years now, and only started having these problems the past week or two.
I was able to run the Western Digital Diagnostics program on the vanishing drive, and it gave me a SATA cable error. I doubt that's the actual problem, but I'm going to try switching them and see what happens.
One thing I did figure out about it is that if the drive is in use, it doesn't disappear. I loaded up some MP3 playlists and movies on the drive, and it stayed available for 2 hours while they were playing. I closed them, and it was gone when I checked again in a few minutes.
But yeah this could actually be a problem with the cable or the connector on the drive, or the connector on the mobo.
I had a motherboard that wouldn't detect SATA drives occasionally, I had to power it down and try several times until it did. Then one day it never detected them ever again, but the rest of the motherboard worked 100% well, only the SATA ports died out.
Anybody know of any good data recovery methods? I've got a lot of stuff on the bad drive I'd like to get back. All the important stuff is backed up, but it was also my media drive.