Is my hard drive toast?

Bionic Monkey

This weekend, I turned off my computer for a few minutes to fiddle with my monitor, and when I turned it back on, my 500 gb hard drive was no longer recognized by Windows. Strangely enough though, BIOS still recognizes that there's a hard drive there. It just seems to cease to exist once Windows boots up.

I suspect it's completely gone (which fucking sucks for all the stuff I had on there), but don't have a whole lot of experience with failed hard drives to know for certain.

As a bonus question: higher capacity drives shouldn't fail more frequently, right? I bought this 500 with another at the same time about two years ago, and the other failed about a year back. I'm thinking there was just a bad batch, but paranoia's niggling at the back of my mind on this.

Scrublet

Higher capacity drives are just as susceptible to failure as smaller drives, it simply depends on the manufacturer. For instance, Seagate's range of consumer 1TB drives had some sort of issue that made them prone to failure, and has caused a lot of people to switch to Western Digital.

As far as your own drive, it's not looking good. If you aren't able to get help on here, one thing you might try is taking it to a local computer repair store (or even Best Buy, I'm not sure how good they are at this) and see if they can get your stuff off for you.

wunderbar

have you looked in disk management to see if it's still there? if it's being recognized in the bios that's a good thing.

You can also try a linux live CD to see if you can recognize it.

Shorn Scrotum Man

What were you doing to your monitor that required your machine to be turned off? What were you doing inside your machine?

Bionic Monkey

Shorn Scrotum Man wrote: »

What were you doing to your monitor that required your machine to be turned off? What were you doing inside your machine?

I found some old computers while cleaning house, and have been scavenging parts to build a couple functional machines I can give away to family members. My monitor has several inputs, but for some reason, won't select a different one, if the main DVI one is already active.

And I actually didn't touch the inside of my machine until the drive failed.

I just turned it off, messed around with the other computer, then turned it on again.

Ego

If you do a hard-drive auto-detect in the BIOS, does it still see the drive? A lot of BIOS' work by scanning for new drives, and then 'remembering' them thereafter to save time on boot-ups.

What were you doing cleaning your house? Who do you think you are, trying to scavenge parts for spare computers? Think you're some kind of fancy man, with your multiple-input monitor?

(JK, of course)

mr_ekim

Well, let's do some basic diagnostics, if you don't mind:

1. Do you hear the hard drive spin up when powering on the computer? Is there any abnormal noises coming from the hard drive?

- If everything seems normal go to step 2

- If there is abnormal noises, there is probably a head or motor problem. Prepare for your data to be lost.

2. By "Windows not recognizing the drive" you mean that when you open My Computer, the drive does not appear or do you mean when you go to "Device Manager", you don't see the drive appear under "Disk Drives"?

- If it's the former, right click on "My Computer" then "Manage". Go to "Disk Management". Do you see a drive with a 500GB capacity without a drive letter? If so, right click on the drive, then "Change Drive Letter and Paths". Assign a new drive letter.

- If it is the latter, come back and report that, there are diagnostic programs you can try.

Cronus

This could be an issue with IDE drives, I'm not sure about SATA hopefully someone who remembers can say so, but the jumpers could have come loose. That could cause the bios to see that hard drive, but Windows not to.

Many hard drives with drivers have a diagram somewhere on the drive showing where the jumper should be for what configuration.

wunderbar

sata dont' have jumpers.

Yes, I know that SATA drives do have jumpers, but they are only to force it down to 1.5Gbps speeds, it should not affect at all whether the drive is recognized at all.

ParisInFlames

So here's what's wrong, my 1TB SATA Segate drive doesn't show up at all now after a windows update install and a shutdown last night. My IDE windows XP drive functions fine. But my WD Raptor SATA drive with Windows 7 on it doesn't show up during bios, but does show up when I load XP and explore it.

So after my drives stopped showing up the next morning I looked to see what it was I installed:

Windows XP Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - March 2009 (KB890830) Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Microsoft Update
Windows XP Security Update for Windows XP (KB960225) Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Automatic Updates
Windows XP Security Update for Windows XP (KB958690) Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Automatic Updates
Windows XP Update for Windows XP (KB959772) Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Automatic Updates

Nothing that would lead me to believe it was the problem. But anyway I did a system restore to an earlier point, and installed the SATA drivers for good measure. Still nothing.

I use a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Motherboard

Scrublet

ParisInFlames, go to that Seagate link you put in that post, and look at the one-egg reviews. 24%. That is pretty bad for something that has 657 reviews, and they all talk about death of those drives. So that would be my first assumption. Unfortunately I have no idea about the Raptor. It seems odd that both drives would have issues like that at once, but the Seagate 1TB failure rate is pretty high...may just be bad luck.