hi everyone. ive been searching the tech forums for following problem: using winXP after some time my 2nd HD disappears and im only able to access it again by rebooting my PC. while reading through the different posts it seemed to me that this is a fairly common problem and there were many good (but often complicated) suggestions how to solve it but up to now i havent found a solution that worked. while discussing the issue with a friend of mine we came to a solution that (if it works) is both simple and surprising: xp has energy save options where you can set your HD to shut down after a certain time. what we think could be the problem is that if you dont use the 2nd disk for the time it allocated to shutdown it disappears because the energy save prog. deactivates the disk as if it was on master - but cannot reactivate it. that may also be the reason why it simply reappers as if nothing happened after reboot. could work right? opinions plz. regards LoBaron
I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Common sense tells me it would shut both drives down not one. And it only will shut down drives if the computer is inactive for a period of time and ya have it set it to do this via windows and the bios. So ya probally got a gremlin. A bad mobo...drive....or windows is corrupt. Try running the drive manufacter's utility to test the drive and also enable smart monitoring in the bios to see if ya got error's. The only other thing that makes sense is maybe ya power supply is overloading and the drive is starving for juice....so it shuts down. Mine did that till I got another psu outside of the case just to power the 4 hard disks in mine.:>
well the HD im using as a slave atm was the primary on my old PC till about 3 months ago and i had no problems there so it should be in good condition. my pc now ran for 7 hours and HD2 is still there but i have to admit i havent started any large programs up to now. ill keep you updated edit: yes both disks should disappear but that was axactly what i meant: the master reappears at once if you do any kind of data transfer on the computer but the secondary doesnt. you dont notice the master HD disappearing because as soon as you access your computer its back there.
just forgot: you could be right bout the power supply. mine is a bit on the weak side (thats why i went with radeon and not nvidea as new graphics card because it uses much less juice). but up to now my 2nd disk hasnt disappeared since i turned off the enrgy save options.
if anyone is interested: my disappearing HD2 problem IS solved by deactivating the energy save options. if you experienced the same problem its worth a try.
