Newish Hard Drive Disppears Randomly in Vista

[purplefire]

Hey there all,

Man i miss the days when my vista install worked flawlessly. For some reason now however i am constantly encountering new and more irritating problems.

For some reason, all of a sudden, my tertiary 350G hard drive keeps disappearing in Vista after an arbitrary period of time. This started just today, and has already happened several times. It works fine after a fresh boot, and items on it are accessible for an hour or so (some times it's as low as 20 minutes, it doesn't seem to matter how long). Until suddenly i'll go to launch a program that is installed on it via a shortcut, only to be told it can't be found. The drive then vanishes from My Computer, device manager, disk management. It shows up in BIOS though.

I ran a full virus scan on it and didn't find anything of consequence.

I have had the drive for about two years now, which i don't consider that old for a hard drive. It doesn't get utilised that often as it is primarily for storage and the odd program.

this problem is very irritating. I've read for one person having a similar problem to me, managed to fix it by installing a new PSU as it was receiving insufficient power, but i have never had this problem before as far as i can remember and nothing in my system has changed. The power being supplied is well into the green.

I'm unsure if it's related or not, but i have recently been experiencing another problem. I can no longer restart my computer. Every time i do so, it freezes on the first screen, there hard drives and disk drives are detected and outputted onto the screen. it hangs there for what seems to be about 5 minutes before finally moving on to the next screen, where you usually press F8 to access boot options. It then hangs on this screen for an even longer period of time before informing me it can't read from the boot drive (or words to that effect). I can restart it then as many timers as i want to no avail, the same thing happens, until i power off the computer, then power it back on. It then usually boots up fine.

This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, so i'm unsure if the two things are related. I generally don't turn off my system, but put it into sleep mode.

I am running Vista 64, all cables are in good condition.

 

[croc]

Hey there all,

Man i miss the days when my vista install worked flawlessly. For some reason now however i am constantly encountering new and more irritating problems.

For some reason, all of a sudden, my tertiary 350G hard drive keeps disappearing in Vista after an arbitrary period of time. This started just today, and has already happened several times. It works fine after a fresh boot, and items on it are accessible for an hour or so (some times it's as low as 20 minutes, it doesn't seem to matter how long). Until suddenly i'll go to launch a program that is installed on it via a shortcut, only to be told it can't be found. The drive then vanishes from My Computer, device manager, disk management. It shows up in BIOS though.

I ran a full virus scan on it and didn't find anything of consequence.

I have had the drive for about two years now, which i don't consider that old for a hard drive. It doesn't get utilised that often as it is primarily for storage and the odd program.

this problem is very irritating. I've read for one person having a similar problem to me, managed to fix it by installing a new PSU as it was receiving insufficient power, but i have never had this problem before as far as i can remember and nothing in my system has changed. The power being supplied is well into the green.

I'm unsure if it's related or not, but i have recently been experiencing another problem. I can no longer restart my computer. Every time i do so, it freezes on the first screen, there hard drives and disk drives are detected and outputted onto the screen. it hangs there for what seems to be about 5 minutes before finally moving on to the next screen, where you usually press F8 to access boot options. It then hangs on this screen for an even longer period of time before informing me it can't read from the boot drive (or words to that effect). I can restart it then as many timers as i want to no avail, the same thing happens, until i power off the computer, then power it back on. It then usually boots up fine.

This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, so i'm unsure if the two things are related. I generally don't turn off my system, but put it into sleep mode.

I am running Vista 64, all cables are in good condition.

You wrote quite a long book but seem to have forgotten to include any pertinent information. MB? Drives / MFG? GPU? PSU?

A first guess would be that your PSU is dying. PSU's can have overheating issues also, y'know.

 

[purplefire]

Alright, calm down.

PSU: 600W. I doubt it's dying, it performs very well for everything else, it also isn't that old. And the problem is just affecting this one drive.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L

GPU: 8800GT

Processor: Q6600

MFG:? I'm not sure what this abbreviation means.

As for the hard drives, i'm not sure which is which, i can't seem to locate anywhere in windows that tells me the manufacturer or hardware designation for the drive coupled with the allocated letter.

 

[croc]

Try this.... Unplug the power cable from the drive that disappears, then run for as long as you usually do to experience the boot issue. Is the problem still there?

 

[purplefire]

Hey again. I unfortunately haven't had the chance to test your idea as i'm a bit strung for time. Just thought i'd quickly post a little update that i have just encountered.

Just turned the machine on, and as soon as windows logged in, i heard a 'New Hardware' sound effect, coupled with a curious few short, quiet beeps from within the casing. It then gave me a dialog with choices for opening the new device, which turned out to be my X drive. That's the first time i've ever been informed of an internal hard drive being discovered.