Hard Drive Disappears

Sometimes (once-twice a week) my second hard drive disappears from Windows Explorer & I can't find it until i restart. It's an 80Gb Maxtor 6Y80P0 7200rpm ide drive (not sata) and it's my second hard drive I dedicate only for video editing (it's not my boot disk of course).

It only does this randomly - no pattern detected yet - I'm virus free. Restarting solves the problem. It maybe does it when computer has been on for a while but no power settings indicate it should shut down (Hard disks are set to turn off after 30 mins but i assume that's both).

I got a P4 3GhZ HT with 1024Mb Ram

 

Have you tried putting a new ide lead in.Maybe it is slighty faulty and not giving you a good connection to you mob.

 

I also get an error message some times saying Error writing to F:\System Volume Information (F: is concerned HDD) and now My Symantec AV has tolde me it's deleted a file called A0030647.exe (sounds like a randomly generated virus file to me). It says this fule resided in F:\System Volume Information\ Restore THEN SOME NUMBERS. I'll try formatting the hard drive - think this'll work?

 

well it disappears from device manager (XP Pro SP2) but reappears on restaring (i haven't gone in to check the bios on rebooting though. Is there a way of checking bios without rebooting (as rebooting fixes the problem)? i never lose any data when this happens

The virus i found was backdoor.trojan but symantec's security response page said nothing bout this particular problem. I've reformatted and i'll see if this helps (although problem seems to occur when computer is left idle for a while). this is why i dont think its overheating as comp is normally idle when it happens.

maybe i should reformat with fdisk or something as that won't create/use the "system volume information" folder that xp does (i assume).

 

I've reformatted & the hard drive is still disappearing. I'll try to reformat with fdisk in case the XP System Volume Information folder is corrupted (although I assume this would be replace by Windows when restaring).

 

Hey

Download Maxtor Powermax and run the diagnostic when the drive is present and also when it vanishes.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download1386.html

See what it finds.

 

Yah cool - think I'll try that - Haven't tried a new IDE cable though.

 

Tried Powermax and no problems found! Also tried reformatting but with Windows (not Fdisk). Haven't tried changing the IDE cable though.

 

hmmmm... no 2nd hdd is on 2nd ide channel as slave (come to think of it it's only slave because i used to have a cdrom on that channel but no longer - maybe it should be master? Don't know why that'd cause problem though).

 

Sure I'll do that - I've just realised my power settings were to turn off HDD after 1 hour in WinXP's power options. That HDD dissappears but ny first HDD doesn't though. Could it be a problem waking up from that? I'll swap it around to Secondary Master though and put power options back on (to turn off after 1 hour).

 

MOTHERBOARD JUST DIED!!! Thankfully it's under warranty & in the shop now waiting for a repla cement. Hopefully it was the same problem.

I won't kill this thread yet just to check that a new motherboard fixes the problem. Thanks for all your help guys - I've learnt heaps (especially ianski7).

Don't know why I didn't think of setting HDD to turn off after 5 mins so i didn't have to wait that long!!!

MB was an Intel D865PERL. ANybody else had similar problems with it? Was operating fine otherwise - hardly ever a crash.

 

I give up! Motherboard has been replaced and same problem. HDD is still under warranty so I'm taking it back to the shop.

 

Sounds to me like the HDD is failing. You can check this by looking in your system log.

-Right click my computer then select manage.
-Double click event viewer then select system.
-In the discription section look for anything that says DISK.
-If you find one and it has a red circle X then double click it to read the info.

Im suspecting you will see a message something like hdd0\hdd1 is reporting it will fail or has bad blocks.

Yes it is true FDISK is not in XP but CHKDSK is still there. If the message is only bad blocks or no error message at all then run CHKDSK by clicking on start then run. Type CHKDSK d: /r (assuming D is your trouble drive)then click ok. a message will come up asking if you want to schedule at next startup. Say yes then reboot. The scan will take a long time so go ahead and go shopping for an hour.

Now if the other message shows up then its time for a trip to the computer store to get a new HD. All this I threw in can be done if the drive is showing or not except for the chkdsk command, the drive must exsist for that. Curious though, next time the drive goes away go into manage again. this time click disk management and see if it still shows the drive. If it does then it could indicate the FAT is messed up on the problem drive.

Good luck
-Del

 

Went to Event Viewer & the error source for the error was PlugPlayManager and reads as below. I think the problem's gone now so it looks like it might be the motherboard. I ran CHDSK but when I came back no window was there!

The device 'Maxtor 6Y080P0' (IDE\DiskMaxtor_6Y080P0__________________________YAR41BW0\3259514551454533202020202020202020202020) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

 

smiley,

I'm having the exaxct same problem as well. I have TWO drives off of the IDE controller (booting off SATA drive) and when I'm doing some fairly intensive file manipulation (clrmamepro with thousands of small files) I get the same messasge and the event lot error. One hd is a WD and the other is a Maxtor. I don't think it has anything to do with the hds themselves, but some weird Windows problem.

The drive that 'seems' to cause the problem is formated with fat32. I'm going to try to convert it to NTFS and see what happens.

Keep us posted if you find a fix. Now that I started researching this problem I'm finding a lot of folks seeing it. I'll update this thread if I come across a fix.

Rhindle