Mystery of disappearing hard drive

[Captain Zap]

Hi i am new here, i have a problem with a disappearing hard drive, i checkt almost all i can.

Checkt : connectors, cable, PSU, swapt the drive, updated the BIOS, Drivers, settings, all i can think of.

System specs : Intel Xenon L5640
Asus P6T Delux V2
Corsair XMS3 6Gb Triple channel
Coolermaster Silent Pro 850W
Primary HD : Samsung Evo 840 120Gb SSD
Secondary HD : Samsung SSD 50Gb By DELL
Grafix : Sapphire HD 6970 2Gb

The problem is with the second ssd, it keeps disappearing after a short time.When i reboot and check the bios the hard drive is still there en after windows starts it shows, but after an undefined time it's gone.
I am running Windows 7 x64 up to date legal version, clean instal 3 day's ago.
check lot's of forums and fond nothing helpfull.

I am from Belgium and if my english is bad sorry.

Can u help me plz.

 

[Saga Lout]

I am from Belgium and if my english is bad sorry

Nothign wrong with your English - it's definitely better than my Vlaams!

One possibility is the lack of power from the PSU. What Wattage is yours? Maybe there's some Power Saving setting somewhere in the device's properties pages.

 

[Captain Zap]

Thx Saga Lout, i repaced the psu with a new one, before it was a coolermaster real power 850w now it is a Coolermaster silent power 850w. I checked the settings for power savings setting and add a special entry in the advanced settings special for AHCI settings. I am struggeling for 2 days now and do not know what to do any more, i checked everything i can think of. Pffffff.

Thx for the help

 

[simondclinch]

ahoy capn,

I have been managing similar problems now and again the last few months. I managed to overcome them so here are my tips:

My setup: two old 80GB maxtors (like 14 yrs old!) 1 samsung 1tb, about 5 yrs old. All three drives have occasionally had problems. I was just about to replace one of the really old ones but it is now living its third life okay (twice had to do major surgery), although its days might still be numbered! I have used XP, Ubuntu and currently Windows 8.1 which appears to be the best for managing these problems...

Assuming scanning from disk mgt doesn't go anywhere sensible, the first thing to try is chkdisk /f from an administrator command prompt. If problems persist, backup the drive (if that fails, you'll need the drive recovered and replaced by a specialist unless you are happy to lose the data but recover the drive in which case read on -sometimes you may have to skip some files from the backup in the can-lose scenario). Then try a slow format of the drive and then restart. You may have to format again on restart. Either way disable the quick format flag when dealing with such problems. If the drive comes back at this stage it may live again and can be repopulated from backup. Otherwise you'll have to replace it.

Note: the hard drive can disappear at any time until the problem is resolved. A restart should bring it back. Otherwise use something like driverscanner to check the drivers are up to date.