Hard drives disappear

[rhegedus]

Up until this morning my PC was working fine. The set-up was:

1xWD 160GB HD for XP
2xSamsung 500GB SATA, 1xWD 500GB IDE and 1xSamsung 1TB SATA for storage with a Samsung TSSCorp DVD burner.

Today I added a LG Blu-Ray burner and in doing so moved some of the drives and cables around the case for better routing.

Now, windows won't see the 1TB Samsung and one of the 500GB Samsung drives.

BIOS sees all of the drives and reports the correct capacities for both Samsung 500GB HD but reports that the 1TB Samsung is only 33MB





WTF???



Any ideas?

[minidv2dvd]

you have physically made sure all the cables are fully inserted? just asking because i had a sata cable on a h.d. that "looked" like it was plugged in but the drive would periodically disappear from the computer bios and crash windows.

if they are attached i'd try new cables on the "missing" drives. different power connections too, just swap things around.

is the power supply up to snuff? with that much equipment in the case i'd have at least a 750 watt unit maybe more, to be able to send enough wattage at startup to spin all those drives.

if you put things on different ide/sata connections, id use the bios "reset all to safe boot" to let the board re-find all the drives. also if you moved or added any ide devices make sure the master/slave pins are correct.

[lordsmurf]

I had trouble with a 1TB drive at work. The only solution was to put it in an enclose, and now it works great.

[RabidDog]

I have same MOBO and I think, a similar problem only two HD drives one sata and one Ide . Problem is SAta drive disappears after Hibernation, I have to go into control panel, hardware mgr, disk drives and then "rediscover" it. No problems with it really, I am awaiting an answer from gigbayte. I suspect I will have to re-install xp, to the Sata drive to cure it (hopefully).

And I STILL cant overclock this mobo due to its redhot north bridge

[rhegedus]

And I STILL cant overclock this mobo due to its redhot north bridge

Really? I've had my Q6600 2.4Ghz upto 3.0GHz.

[minidv2dvd]

And I STILL cant overclock this mobo due to its redhot north bridge

Really? I've had my Q6600 2.4Ghz upto 3.0GHz.

he's saying the northbridge chip on his nvidia based motherboard overheats, no the cpu.


did you get the drive problem squared away?

[rhegedus]

did you get the drive problem squared away?

Nope.

I tried new cables on different SATA sockets, no change.

Windows and Acronis report the 500Gb drive as dynamic and needing formatting and the 1Tb drive is picked up as 7Gb. Using an external enclosure made no difference.

I suspect the 500Gb drive may be recoverable with time and patience but the 1Tb drive is worrying: it has 32Mb of cache so maybe this is what BIOS is picking up and not the drive - this is the same symptom that others with this 1Tb drive describe when it suffers a terminal failure.

Who'd have thought that moving a cable around could f*ck things up so badly?

Both Samsung, 500Gb a year old, 1Tb 3 months old!!!

Last samsung drives I ever buy

[SLK001]

Last samsung drives I ever buy

I don't know if I would be too quick to blame the drives. Have you been able to go back to your original configuration? With the BIOS not seeing things, it has to be a hardware problem/conflict. Try removing the LG and see if things improve.

[rhegedus]

Tried it with LG out - just the os drive plugged in and either of the problem drives being moved from sata to sata.

[minidv2dvd]

rob - i'd get a usb to sata/ide connector. one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156017
i use that one and it works with any size drive, if it still spins and has anything that is recoverable.

i can't send drives back that contain customer data, so i use a sledge hammer them.

western digital is all i've been using for a while now. quiet and reliable.

[rhegedus]

Thanks for the suggestion.

What will it do that an extarnal USB caddie won't?

[minidv2dvd]

some enclosures have GB size limits.

the connector is handy in that it does 2.5, and 3.5 ide's and sata. haven't tried it yet but it claims to be able to handle more than one type at a time, i.e. a 3.5 ide and a sata.

it's just a tool that has come in handy for desktop and laptop drives. it sits on a shelve until needed.

[rhegedus]

Solved!

Two little free programs came to the rescue!

TestDisk

HDD Capacity Restore

In its wisdom, when my 1TB drive went south, windows flipped and made my 500GB drive dynamic unformatted, hence the correct BIOS details but not showing up in windows. TestDisk allowed me to access the partition and copy the files across to an extarnal HD. I'm reformatting the original drive now to basic so I should still be able to use it and restore the backed up files to it.

The HD103UJ seems to have a problem where occasionally the drive misreports its capacity to bios. HDD Capacity Restore resets what the drive is showing BIOS to the factory setings without erasing the data.

I've got my two drives back!

The scary thing is that I recieved a few quotes from data recovery companies that were between 500-700GBP per drive depending on capacity!!!