Another problem - hard drive sometimes not showing up

[Conquest10]

I don't know what's happening to me this week. I guess since I haven't really have computer problems in the past couple of years its all catching up.

I tried searching but I kept getting problems like the hard drive doesn't show up at all or not the whole drive shows up.

The problem is that sometimes the hard drive does not get recognized. So, the OS does not boot. I have to keep resetting the machine until the hard drive shows up in the bios. It eventually sees it but this is just frustrating. Anyone know how to fix this problem?

There is only one drive installed, BTW.

[rallynavvie]

Sounds like the drive is about to die. These are exactly the same symptoms of a 200GB drive I had that died recently. It was about 4 years old and had been worked pretty hard so it wasn't too surprising. It was never a boot drive though but the rest of your symptoms sound just like the issues I was having with it.

Don't wait for it to die completely though. Take this opportunity to back up anything important off of it and get a new drive to replace it.

[Conquest10]

Damn!! This is the drive I got last week.

[zoobie]

was it a cheapo? the market's being flooded with cheapos now....$29 up...made in china i'm guessing

[Conquest10]

Maxtor 120gb drive at Staples. Made in Singapore.

[budz]

try testing the maxtor drive with powermax which can be downloaded at the maxtor website. then you'll know for sure if the drive is dying a slow death.

[Bodyslide]

Also check the IDE cables, one could be bad...

[Conquest10]

Thanks budz, I will try that.

Bodyslide, I'm only using one cable. DVD drive seems fine.

[Sartori]

To concur with BodySlide , it doesnt work that way about the DVD drive working so its ok , as your problem is intermittent , it can still be the cable . And as RallyNavvie points out - back up ASAP .

[Nelson37]

Eliminate the second drive connected on the cable.

Get a different IDE cable.

Use a different power connector.

These things are all cheap and easy to do. They have also all solved such problems, on more than one occassion each, in the past.

Never trust software to tell you whether an intermittent problem exists or not. It can tell you whether the problem exists at the time the software is run, but not 5 minutes before or after. If the problem is constant, you don't need the software to tell you that.

Check your warranty.

[Conquest10]

OK, I put in a new cable (right out of the bag) and it still did the same thing.

I unplugged the DVD drive and it booted up just fine. So it seems that the DVD drive is the cause of the problem somehow. Can somebody shed some light on the possible reasons?

[InXess]

Same steps apply, check power and data cable, BIOS and jumper settings (misconfiguration?).

[Conquest10]

Thanks all. This is why I love this place.

I took out the DVD drive and set the jumper to slave. I plugged it in and all worked well.

[rallynavvie]

I took out the DVD drive and set the jumper to slave. I plugged it in and all worked well.

That would do it. If only my problem was simply a jumper setting too

You should do yourself a favor and set all your IDE devices to "cable select" so you never run into that issue anymore. Everything IDE device in my house is set to CS.

[Nelson37]

In order to do that you must have Cable Select cables, and the positioning of the Master and Slave connectors Dictate to you the position of the drives.

How hard is it to set one Jumper to master, and the other to slave?

Some device combinations this must be reversed, sometimes both must be either master or slave. This only happens with an optical drive in the mix.

[InXess]

CSEL is most convenient. Some drives (as pointed out mainly optical) are not happy with this setting, use master/slave. Don't mix CSEL with master/slave on the same IDE channel. Drives disappear when 2 are competing for the same spot, then usually 1 gets bumped.