Mysterious Disappearing Drives
Posted on June 8, 2006
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Here’s a bit of a stumper. For the past several weeks, my “main” home machine periodically loses any recollection of having 2 of it’s hard drives. What’s odd is that one is SATA and the other is an external USB. Fortunately, at least, the primary SATA drive doesn’t go anywhere. The odd part is that if I shut down the machine and then power it back up after 5 seconds I’m back to 3 hard drives.
As my power supply had been acting up I had theorized that perhaps the disappearing drives were a side-effect. However, I swapped out the bad PS for a much better one last evening and… my drives were gone this evening. *sigh*
Once the drives “disappear” the only place XP sees ‘em is in the Disk Administrator snap-in. Both as type unknown and both as unitialized. It cheerfully offers to initialize them for me, but thus far I’ve managed to resist that offer. Seems like that wouldn’t be conducive to keeping my data.
Any clever ideas? The truly weird thing is that one disappearing drive is USB. The other SATA. And the one not disappearing is SATA too. I’m drawing blanks.
Tags: drives, PC, troubleshooting
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Assuming this happens while the machines are on and running eliminates it being the bios battery. For most users this wouldn’t be an issue as they’re thrown away before the battery goes, but *some* people tend to use computers forever…. or at least long past their sell-by date hehehe.
If the computer’s on when it happens try running a screen saver that accesses those two drives, like a slide show aimed at folders in each of the drives… see if that stops it from happening. Perhaps it’s some weird power saver feature bug that kicks in if they’re not used?
I’m thinking power management too. Is your current power management profile configured to spin down hard drives after an elapsed idle time? If so, try swithing hard drives to ‘always on’.
Does there seem to have any pattern with the diappearence? Or do they drop off randomly, even when in use?