Hard Drive disappears when computer goes to Stand By.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

XP Home SP3
380W PSU
MSI KT6V mobo
C: Western Digital 80GB PATA/IDE
D: Maxtor DiamondMax+ 40GB PATA/IDE
E: Seagate 38GB 5400RPM laptom PATA/IDE
F: LG GSA-4040B DVD drive
ATI Radeon 9600XT
5 case fans...
all USB devices have their own power supply

I took the 40GB C: drive out of my HTPC and put it in my office PC to replace the 5400RPM laptop drive I'd been using as a back-up device.
This 40GB drive is slaved to my OS drive on the primary IDE channel. Originally both drives were jumpered to Cable Select.
When the computer goes into Stand By the 40GB drive disappears upon bringing the pc back up.

It does not matter if Stand By is attained via my preset Desktop power settings or if I manually initiate Stand By.
If I reboot the drive re-appears in Windows. My half-assed lazy 'fix' to this has been to open Explorer in a window and navigate to any folder on that drive, then keep that window minimized. Doing this would somehow keep the drive from disappearing. But sometimes I forget...

Upon every boot the BIOS sees all 3 hard drives as "S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status OK", and when I go into the BIOS it always sees the drive that is disappearing in Windows.
Event Viewer has a warnings listed that state: "Read of USN log for NTFS volume d: failed with error code 0xC000026E. Volume will remain offline until the Indexing Service (cisvc) is restarted." but the time/date stamps of these warnings do not all correspond to the times that the PC has gone to sleep or awakened, and some of them are for times when I was actively using the drive and continued to do so for an extended period thereafter...
WTF?
Event Viewer also has an Error that says "The device 'Maxtor 6E040L0' (IDE\DiskMaxtor_6E040L0__________________________N AR61590\3145463050444554202020202020202020202020) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.", but again the time/date stamps of these warnings do not all correspond to the times that the PC has gone to sleep or awakened, and some of them are for times when I was actively using the drive and continued to do so for an extended period thereafter...

Also, it doesn't happen every time the computer goes into Stand Bynd I have been unable to determine any sort of pattern to when it does or doesn't happen.
I don't think it's a hardware problem because the BIOS sees the drive everytime and the whole opening Explorer and browsing to that drive and keeping that window open stops it from happening. Just for shits and giggles I have changed the jumper settings to C: = Master and D: = Slave and I have replaced the IDE cable (like 5 minutes ago).

Can anybody tell me what in the world is going on here?
I don't think it's underpowered PSU because if it were I'd think there would be other issues instead of just one specific hard drive disappearing from Windows after recovering from Stand By.

I'm considering moving everything from the drive onto the drive it 'replaced' and reformatting...

TIA!

[nic2k4]

I've seen odd things happen when mixing maxtor drives with other brands; try it on the other IDE channel. Also, I'd go in the drives settings and disable indexing and then disable the indexing service. All it's supposed to do is speed up searching, but that's the thing that keeps accessing the drives while you're not doing anything. How often do you search your drives that you can't wait a few seconds more

[HotDamn!]

Do you have it set to turn you HDD's off at a certain time in your power settings? Maybe not the issue but if it is set to turn them off then maybe that one drive is having trouble turning back on for some reason and keeping them on at all times may prevent this.

Anyways, have you tried a different connection for that drive? Maybe its having contact issues

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Do you have it set to turn you HDD's off at a certain time in your power settings? Maybe not the issue but if it is set to turn them off then maybe that one drive is having trouble turning back on for some reason and keeping them on at all times may prevent this.

Anyways, have you tried a different connection for that drive? Maybe its having contact issues

I thought about the power settings at first too because I used to have that set up, but when I went into the options 'turn hard drives off' is set to never so... nope.
I've replaced the cable, so far so good, but my machine hasn't gone into standby since I swapped the cable - definitely will tonite when I go to bed though.

[DarrellS]

I was always told to turn off all power saving options in both Windows and in BIOS. They tend to cause more problems than they're worth.

[jagabo]

I've found that many drives and motherboards from that era (40 GB) don't work properly with Windows' standby/sleep options.

[Bjs]

Its generally not an issue so long as power save feature is enabled in the bios prior to os install ... do it the other way around will cause such problems.

Disable "write cache" for the drive involved ... really is meant to be used with new drives

Right click on the affected drive > properties > tools > properties > policies = uncheck box > ok > ok > reboot system.

May be suffering from slow spinup times > try Active@ Hard Disk Monitor ... check its health status.

Confirm bios power management is setup as S3

[Xylob the Destroyer]

yup, yup, and yup
I'll check out that software and see what it has to say.
Thanks all. Hopefully all these small tweaks will add up to a fix - the devil is in the details...

[didikai]

yup, yup, and yup
I'll check out that software and see what it has to say.
Thanks all. Hopefully all these small tweaks will add up to a fix - the devil is in the details...

Check your cables to the HD

[Xylob the Destroyer]

yeah...

I've replaced the cable, so far so good...

[didikai]

yeah...

I've replaced the cable, so far so good...

I know, but mine had the exact same symptoms, and it turned out to be a soppy litte orange cable. This was a brand new machine, under warranty, and the store changed the 2 hard drives, put all new memory chips in. They had the machine back 6 times before someone changed this little cable. Voila!

[RabidDog]

I used to have a similar problem and it was to do with the motherboard(Nvidia650)/OS (win/xp)/ DIsk not really implementing standby /powersaving modes correctly. You can try going into control panel /system/device mgr/disk drives and then right click ..Scan for hardware changes.. that would normally bring the drive back to life. I would advise updating all mobo drivers etc.
And maybe invest in one good PHAT drive to replace that tangle .. possibly an IDE SSD or at least a 7200rpm .
It vanished when I re-installed the OS.