[SOLVED] Hard Drive failing or disconnecting minutes after powering up

[comadden]

Hi all, any help would be hugely appreciated
I've done some troubleshooting and have explained everything below.

Computer Specs:
GPU: GTX 970 4GB Gigabyte Card
Ram: 16GB HyperX Fury DDR3 1866MHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z79P -D3 LGA1150 ATX
CPU: Intel core i7 4790k CPU
Cooler: Corsair H100i
HDD: WD Caviar 3TB Green
HDD: WD Blue 2TB
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 120GB
PSU: Corsair CX600M

I have my operating system (Windows 10) and very few programs on the SSD, and then all my files and most of my programs on the two hard drives. The two drives are dynamically linked using the partition manager in windows and labelled as M.

Initial error occurred while photo editing/using dropbox, (not doing anything unusual) on 31st of October.

I was shown a plain blue screen, so I restarted my computer, this is where issues began to occur.

Since the blue screen, when I turn on my computer it will only recognise my 2TB Blue WD drive for 2-3minutes. (in this time everything works as normal, and I can see all my files, and copy off some files) Then it seemingly disconnects/fails? and programs looking for the M drive begin to give error messages and it’s not visible in Device manager or the explorer window.

When I reboot it again it becomes visible (for 2-3 mins). It then disappears.

Usually the next time I try to reboot it does not appear, and if I continue to reboot after that it does not re-appear.

If I leave the PC off for approx. 1 hour or overnight and power on again the M Drive does reappear (again for 2-3 minutes).

I have tested using different Sata cables, power cables and different ports on the motherboard.

I have changed the wall socket that the PC is plugged into.

When the drive fails the Partition manager shows that one is missing (2TB WD Blue) and both have a ‘failed’ status. I have tried reactivating them, with no success.

I tried entering chkdsk in the cmd and was shown the error message in the attached photo. https://photos.app.goo.gl/MbPVgVfZiD8uHjY89

I ran the WD diagnostics software on the drive and was shown the error: ‘too many bad sectors’ (didn’t complete the scan before the drive ‘disconnected?’).

I also ran a windows virus scan and at some point during it the screen went black (couldn’t see or do anything apart from move my mouse). (might be unrelated)

Any help would be fantastic,
thanks in advance.

 

[johnbl]

go into control panel and set your system to high performance mode. just to make sure it is not some sleep related problem.

you might also go into bios and find the sata setting and see if there is a setting for hot swap or hot plug and turn it on for your sata port for your drive.

if windows detects any problem with the drive, it might reset the port. the hot plug setting (off) could block the drive from reconnecting.
(you would still need to find out why it is disconnecting)

can not quite read the photo of the screen

windows 8 and above attempt to read the data from bad sectors over and over in a effort to get a clean copy and relocate the data to a new sector and mark the failing sector as bad. Windows 7 you end up having to do a full format on the drive to get the sectors marked as bad.
you can download crystaldiskinfo.exe to read the smart data from the drive and get a estimate of its life. These drives fail at a rate of about 20% for the first year and !5% each year after that until they die. basically after 5 years they die. bearing wear, servo motors that position the read write heads start to mis align and can not read the sector markers on the disk. low level formats help but on windows 8 and above the system detects the problem and moves the data so on windows 8 and 10 the drive last longer before it gets errors but when it gets errors it is just about to totally fail.

 

[comadden]

go into control panel and set your system to high performance mode. just to make sure it is not some sleep related problem.

you might also go into bios and find the sata setting and see if there is a setting for hot swap or hot plug and turn it on for your sata port for your drive.

if windows detects any problem with the drive, it might reset the port. the hot plug setting (off) could block the drive from reconnecting.
(you would still need to find out why it is disconnecting)

can not quite read the photo of the screen

windows 8 and above attempt to read the data from bad sectors over and over in a effort to get a clean copy and relocate the data to a new sector and mark the failing sector as bad. Windows 7 you end up having to do a full format on the drive to get the sectors marked as bad.
you can download crystaldiskinfo.exe to read the smart data from the drive and get a estimate of its life. These drives fail at a rate of about 20% for the first year and !5% each year after that until they die. basically after 5 years they die. bearing wear, servo motors that position the read write heads start to mis align and can not read the sector markers on the disk. low level formats help but on windows 8 and above the system detects the problem and moves the data so on windows 8 and 10 the drive last longer before it gets errors but when it gets errors it is just about to totally fail.

Hi John,
Thanks a million for your quick reply,

I have high performance mode enabled,
I also enabled the hot plug setting which unforunately didn't make any difference.
This is a new link to the image (you may have to download it to view it at full resolution.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zi0km6s4e8uruqw/20181105_005623_HDR.jpg?dl=0

Do you know the best way of extracting data off of this drive as it is nearly impossible to do so in the minute or so I have when its working.
Thanks again

 

[johnbl]

the corruption was in file attributes. it should be a minor fix

------------
you would have to enter the command as
chkdsk /f c:

/f fixes error on the disk
/r locates bad sectors on the disk and attempts to recover readable data


it shold detect it can not lock the drive and offer to run it on the next boot.

with out the /f option it will only show you the errors in the file system and will not actually attempt to fix them.

I would do two runs first with the /f option just to fix the filesystem errors (should be pretty fast)

then after that is completed I would run
chkdisk /r c:
(this option can take a long time, so I would put the machine in high performance mode, so t he machine does not sleep and run the command overnight)


otherwise you would have to get another drive, install windows then plug in the old drive as a data drive and run the chkdsk commands on the data drive to do the repairs.

go into control panel and set your system to high performance mode. just to make sure it is not some sleep related problem.

you might also go into bios and find the sata setting and see if there is a setting for hot swap or hot plug and turn it on for your sata port for your drive.

if windows detects any problem with the drive, it might reset the port. the hot plug setting (off) could block the drive from reconnecting.
(you would still need to find out why it is disconnecting)

can not quite read the photo of the screen

windows 8 and above attempt to read the data from bad sectors over and over in a effort to get a clean copy and relocate the data to a new sector and mark the failing sector as bad. Windows 7 you end up having to do a full format on the drive to get the sectors marked as bad.
you can download crystaldiskinfo.exe to read the smart data from the drive and get a estimate of its life. These drives fail at a rate of about 20% for the first year and !5% each year after that until they die. basically after 5 years they die. bearing wear, servo motors that position the read write heads start to mis align and can not read the sector markers on the disk. low level formats help but on windows 8 and above the system detects the problem and moves the data so on windows 8 and 10 the drive last longer before it gets errors but when it gets errors it is just about to totally fail.

Hi John,
Thanks a million for your quick reply,

I have high performance mode enabled,
I also enabled the hot plug setting which unforunately didn't make any difference.
This is a new link to the image (you may have to download it to view it at full resolution.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zi0km6s4e8uruqw/20181105_005623_HDR.jpg?dl=0

Do you know the best way of extracting data off of this drive as it is nearly impossible to do so in the minute or so I have when its working.
Thanks again

 

[smorizio]

if it the controler on the drive that going bad you may be able to swap the pcb to get your data off. myself i would send the drive to a lab if the data is needed.