Smiley Guy. In your case I would agree that the MB IDE controller has gone bad. I assume you already put the new bord in. That message will remain in your log until you delet it or it gets purged. It does not mean the problem still exsists. I know you noticed the dates. Rhindle, You said you get an event lot error. Did you mean event log error or was it part of an error message on your screen? Assuming it is in your event log, the same as what smiley had, then you also must have a bad IDE controller or cable. Wich drive does it reference? Assuming it is the SATA drive, If your bord has more than one set of SATA then use another set. If it is the IDE then first try to change the cable. If you have another IDE HD on hand use it in place of the HD in question. do thhis for awhile on the same IDE channel to see if the problem still happens. That will rule out your HD as the problem. If after all that the problem remains, then either get a new MB ****with the same IDE controller or xp/2000 will get pissed off and not work**** or put the HD on the second IDE. Slave/master with cd/dvd drive. If your event log is giving you the exact error as smiley then the FAT on the drive has nothing to do with the problem. The event log will tell you the exact HD with a problem if it logs it. Good luck -Del
I got the same exaxt messages smiley got. The popup and the event log that mentions both of my IDE hd's were removed: The device 'WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1' (IDE\DiskWDC_WD1200JB-00CRA1_____________________17.07W17\4457572d414d4338313232393836_039_0_0_0_0) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal. and The device 'Maxtor 6Y250P0' (IDE\DiskMaxtor_6Y250P0__________________________YAR41BW0\3659383356454537202020202020202020202020) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal. Two different hd's on the same IDE controller (secondary). My CD/DVD drives didn't disappear. This would only happen if I was doing something disk intensive on the WD disk which happened to be the only disk that is formated FAT32. My boot disk is a Raptor which is SATA. No problems there. I reproduced this problem at least 3 times in a row when using clrmamepro to go through thousands of small image files for Mame. After a few minutes of going through all these files my mouse would freeze for a few seconds and then I'd get the write cache failure (I forget exactly what it said) in the popup messaage saying the data was lost since the disk was gone and the two messages in the event log. As I mentioned I was going to convert that disk to NTFS just to see if it made a difference. Well, it did. After reproducing this problem 3 times in a row, after formatting that disk to NTFS I never saw the problem again and did many runs of disk intensive clrmamepro operations on thousands of small image files and never once had a problem after that. I realize it doesn't necessarily make any sense, but after I converted to NTFS I could do what I could not do previously with FAT32 in many attempts. It was the exact same operation that failed over and over before the conversion and then worked fine afterward along with many more disk intensive operations. Dunno, just passing my experience along. Who knows, maybe the whole thing will go tits up tonight and I'll lose it all... good thing I gotta external backup 250gb just for that purpose. Rhindle
I guess it doesnt like a FAT32 hd and a NTFS hd on the same IDE channel. I will have to look into that. At least yours is working now. Cheers -DEL
I'm having a similar problem. My primary slave is a 40GB Seagate 5400. I recently installed a P4P800S-X Motherboard and 512MB RAM. At first, if I restarted my PC, I had to shut down then restart for the slave to show up in My Computer and if I shut down then I had to restart for it to show up. Then, for no reason, I had to go into system, device manager and scan for harware changes for it to show up in device manager, My Computer and disc manager. Then I tried formatting C: and re-installing XP and now it won't come up in My Computer regardless what I do. I used getdataback to recover and backup my data then formatted the drive into NTFS with 2 partitions. Still won't show up. Checked the IDE cable and even put my old one back in that always worked. Nothing worked. I've even formatted the drive with the XP CD (booting from it) and when I restated Windows, still nothing. The drive always shows up in BIOS by the way. Any help would be really appreciated. edit: when it shows up in device manager, it's always unallocated.
I didn't know there were different IDE cables apart from the HDD/CDROM one and the FDD one. Master and Slave are on the one IDE and two CD/DVD drives on the other. The master is set to master and the slave to slave. Like I said, I'm now using an IDE cable that I used to use before the upgrade that I had no problems with.
try the drive as master or slave on the other ide cable to see if stays visible as might be compatibility problem with 2 different manufacturers on same cable
Turns out my hard drive was stuffed. My friend had a 40GB Seagate drive exactly the same as mine lying around and it works fine.
My hdd hasn't failed since the MB was replaced so I'm pretty sure the problem's gone. I'm doing some dv editing this weekend we'll see how that works out . . .
My Hard drive to dissappears after a while and restarting solves the problem and each time i restart WinXP always wants to scandisk during bootup and this takes a long time and it scans the disk then says "windows is now scanning free space" and it stops at 17% at least I have watched it remain there for about an hour without moving. Has anyone gotten a solution to the disappearing drives and this persistent scanning of disks. Thanks
if stopping at 17% than is possible the hd might be going. download the diagnostic software from the hd manufacturer & run it & backup your info too
OK my HDD seems to be working fine now. I'll put it down to the motherboard. Am I supposed to close this thread or anything now - it seems you guys have taken over and that's fine with me. I don't want to unsubscribe if you keep it going.
To add another problem report, I have exactly the same thing with exactly the same error message in events. Not only that, I also have an INTEL 865 board. Drive just disappears and come back after reboot. This is weird. The problem only now surfaced after adding a second SATA drive, a Seagate. It never happened before whith any combination of IDE and a single SATA. I am going to keep trying, anyone who has an answer please report back.
try reseating all data & power cables to the drives & motherboard, also check to see if there is a bios update for your motherboard
Thanks for the suggestions. I am not sure what worked but during the day I updated to a newer Bios, even though my other was only 2 months old. I also changed to all new SATA cables, as well as tapping into a different power connector and cleaned all connectors with freon. Hard to say what worked but so far I have not lost another drive. I will keep my fingers crossed.
CHAS0039 - they dealer i bought the computer from said he had a problem with four INTEL D865PERL motherboards out of 50 he has sold. I thought that sounded like a lot but he said it wasn't - I'm just glad it was exchanged with no problems!
