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Missing Hard Drive

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by jjslim, Sep 26, 2004.

  1. baabaa

    baabaa Active member

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    Nice to see you got it sorted.....

    I have to admit that is new one on me, and something I did not think about.....

    The SMART feature is a self monitoring analysis reporting technology function.
    I think this does impere performance but I have never had to enable it....

    I have Maxtor Hard drives (80Gb Prim, 160Gb Sec) and XP (SP2) and do not use SMART.

    What hard drives are you using, because it is certainly something to look out for in the future - thanks for the feedback aswell, because I would assume this may also be the route of other members issues.........well done.........
     
  2. jjslim

    jjslim Member

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    They are Maxtor 6L080L4's. Thanks for the explanation of what SMART is. I was wondering what it was when I enabled it. I'm just glad it somehow fixed the problem.

    Thanks for all the help again,
    Jarrod
     
  3. baabaa

    baabaa Active member

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    Yep, they are the similar build model to mine, but mine do not require that SMART enabled with my system.

    I have XP and SP2 aswell......strange......

    I think I will have a look into this as it has got me intrigued.....
    My first thought is maybe a BIOS issue/your motherboard and a possible conflict with XP SP2 and your motherboard.

    The other thing (if you can) is reset your DMI settings in your BIOS, then do a clean boot and see if it works out......

    However, if you have it working, no reason to play around with it unless you can safely......

    I shall post if I come across anything more.......
     
  4. SirFrench

    SirFrench Member

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    SMART has a massive impact on system performance, seems weird that it needed to be enabled when it causes a hinderance to system performance I personally have never used it either due to it causing disk spin lag, but know people that have experimanted... and then turned it off again!
    I run XPPro SP2, and had issues with my 2nd HD not being recognised in windows before i switched to RAID, after much investigation it turned out that the reason XP didn't like it was that it was formatted in FAT and not NTFS.

    Microsoft seem to like phasing out technology without telling anyone!!

    Just out of curiosity JJSlim, has it made much difference to data retrieval speed on your HD?
     
  5. jjslim

    jjslim Member

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    I haven't done any tests or anything like that, but now that you mention it my system has been running considerably slower then before. I may try disabling SMART and seeing if my HD still shows up.

    ~JJ
     
  6. Swylen

    Swylen Member

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  7. jjslim

    jjslim Member

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    Just for your info. I disabled SMART and my drive is still there now... Could smart have fixed something that was corrupt or something?

    Later,
    JJ
     
  8. Swylen

    Swylen Member

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    I was able to grab the backup MBR off my NTFS disk and install it over the corrupt one using testdisk.exe. It's all fixed now.
     
  9. Swylen

    Swylen Member

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  10. Kanuha

    Kanuha Member

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    Just ran across the same problem. I bought a new Maxtor drive and used a different program to fdisk and format the drive. I did make it active as well. Booted into Windows XP Home and saw the found new hardware icon and bubble. Went to My Computer and I did not see it. Searched through all sorts of options to no avail. Then I searched the Internet and ran across this forum post. After reading and running across a post which directed me to the control panel and admin section. I went into disk management and what did I find? I had a couple of network drives mapped to my daughters computer. One of these drives was mapped as G. This is the same drive letter that Windows said it assigned my new drive, but I did not see it under My Computer. At least not as a Hard Drive. For some reason Windows XP did not change the drive type icon. It did somehow disconnect the mapped network drive though. I went into device manager, uninstalled the drive then went and disconnected all networked (mapped) drives. I then did a reboot and all was well. I remapped the drives to a lower drive letter. Long story, but hope it will help someone who runs into this same problem. It may help the other two individuals who spoke of a problem similar to this one.
     

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