Question Ongoing intermittent HDD Detection problem in BIOS / Windows 11

pt195

Honorable
Jan 12, 2019
6
0
10,510
Hi All,

I've been getting this issue when on some occasions when I boot into W11, either one or both of my two Toshiba 4TB HDD drives (3726 GB actual size in disk management) are not showing in explorer.
Sometimes when I restart the PC then on next boot they will show up, and other times I may have to restart three or four times before they are detected.
They are both using GPT and are formatted as NTFS.
At one point I was using these drives without any issues but as this has been intermittent and happening for quite a long time, I can't say I know what I've changed or done to cause this behavior.

I've been trying to get to the bottom of this recently and have tried the following:
- Updated my chipset, GPU and Audio interface drivers
- Deleted the driver for both drives from device manager to let windows reinstall them on next boot.
- Changed SATA power and data cables for both drives for new ones and ensured connections are good.
- Tested both drives with SeaTools diagnostic, scanned them for bad sectors, ran chkdsk, all SMART feedback is good so I don't believe either of the drives are failing.

When I went into the BIOS a few days back, I could see both drives were detected there, but then when booting into windows the drives were missing.
Then earlier today when I went into the BIOS I saw only one of the drives was shown in BIOS but not the other. So it just seems very random sometimes they're there and sometimes not (both in BIOS and windows) and sometimes a restart will bring them back.

Another thing I noticed in the BIOS under the security tab where the drives are listed, you can go into the security settings for each drive where you can set passwords etc for them, the first line says "security enabled > No" but then there's another line which says "security frozen > Yes" (same on both drives). It says something about power cycling the drive to change this. I don't know if this "security frozen" could have something to do with it or not but I thought it may be worth mentioning.

I have secure boot enabled and fast boot disabled. Another thing I noticed was that when running the SeaTools diagnostic it showed all of my drives as being IDE, but in BIOS it's set to ACHI and device manager suggests its running in ACHI mode. Again not sure if these points are relevant or not.

I haven't updated my BIOS to the very latest for my MB yet, but I'm not convinced that this issue would be fixed by that because as previously mentioned there was a time not so long ago when this wasn't an issue on my current BIOS.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions on what else I can try / check to try to figure out what's causing this, and if it would help to provide more info on anything to assist then do let me know.

Many Thanks
pt195
 
Sorry, system spec is:

Windows 11
Ryzen 7 5700X
ASRock Taichi X470 AM4 running BIOS v5.10
EVGA RTX 2070 GPU
EVGA Supernova 650 G2 PSU
Audient iD14 MK2 Audio Interface
EVO 970 NVMe system drive
1x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDD
2x 4TB Toshiba X300 HDD
 
I'd update your BIOS to version 10.10 to start with.

How damn old is that G2 power supply, because by now that thing is likely around 8-9 years old and could without question be a contributor or the full suspect in your problems. Especially with a 5700x, RTX 2070, add in USB audio device, NVME drive and 3 mechanical hard drives on a PSU that's been around the block a bunch of times. I can't say that IS your issue, I'm just saying, it's a distinct possibility.

It's certainly also possible that there is a problem with the onboard storage controller on your board as well. Or, you know, several other possible things. Might also want to disconnect that Audient device and see if you still have issues.