The Case of the Vanishing HD!

[heavymetalsmith]

Hello Everyone,
It seems that I find myself in an unusual situation that I seemingly can't resolve. I have had this problem for quite some time but only recently have I had time to try and resolve it. Recently I purchased and assembled the following system:

Motherboard: Gigabyte X48 DS4 ( AHCI mode enabled )
Processor: Core 2 Duo E8600 3.3 GHz
Ram: 2x2GB OCZ PC 1066
Graphics: ATI Radeon 4870 ( Saphire )
Storage: Seagate ST3640323AS x 3
Optical: LG DVD Burner
Power: Corsair HX 1000
Case: Antec 1200 Case
OS: Windows Vista Business 64

Now the the problem is that my hard drives are randomly disappearing. When I say disappearing I mean that the OS suddenly can no longer detect them. This also seems to happen randomly to one or more of the drives at a time. If the drive that vanishes is the OS drive the system has a hard lockup and must be rebooted. However, after a soft reboot (just pressing reset) the system will not detect the drive again and will not boot. Rather a hard boot is required (power off and power on) and then everything is okay. This crash seems to happen when doing things that require lots of drive I/O downloading games on Steam, Windows Updates. As you can imagine this has caused quite a bit of chaos on my system stability.

I've performed memory tests, CPU tests, graphics tests, and tests of the hard drives with seatools (dos and win versions). Regardless I can not get anything to fail, I've tried BIOS upgrades to my mother board and driver updates for the hard drives and controller. I've also tried the drives in AHCI mode as well as default sata with the same results. The drives seem to be physically fine according to the tests I've run on them and have never failed or returned a SMART drive report. I've also tried wiggling power and SATA cables while doing stuff on the drives and they do not fail which seems to rule out physical connection.

I'm really at wits end here, I don't mind spending a bit to fix this system but I don't even know where to start. If the drives would fail a test I wouldn't mind blaming them but this doesn't seem the case. So far I've found no help with this sort of issue and while the system is usable I can not work on it in fear of loosing files. Has anyone heard of this sort of problem or issue? ( I haven't been able to find anything? ) Any suggestions on what I can do?

 

[buzznut]

I have had a similar experience but I can't tell you if its related. I have a gigabyte board a 780 G chipset that is notorious for having problems with AHCI. In fact, it would not boot into windows in AHCI mode. To solve the problem I hit the forums and found that there was a problem booting into windows in AHCI mode and I had to enter the bios and change a setting to "IDE mode" (legacy). Its working fine now, but I understand that there is a rather complicated work around mucking around in the windows registry. that I don't have the patience or cajones to try.

Anyway, I would check the gigabyte forums for similar types of problems.

 

[heavymetalsmith]

I've looked around a good bit on the forums and haven't found anyone with this issue. However, if I was going to point my finger at one component I would say the motherboard and the AHCI controller is my main suspect.

 

[buzznut]

yep not a bad conclusion. if it was one hard drive, that would be one thing. Say you haven't been playing with any big magnets around your computer have you?

 

[heavymetalsmith]

No thankfully I moved away from those crazy physicists I lived next to last year. I swear always playing with the particle accelerators and causing resonance cascades and the like.

Now the question is if nothing fails tests and all that is left is the motherboard what do I have to do? I mean I am well over the return date from newegg as this issue has taken me a long time to resolve. Will Gigabyte help me out you think? I did notify them of the problem withing 10 days of receiving the system.