What would cause an internal HD to simply disappear in Windows?

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:49:02 -0400, Yousuf Khan wrote:

wrote:
Yousuf Khan kenjka:
Something strange just happened recently, under Windows 7, although I
have seen it happen under Windows XP before too. A hard drive that's
internal (i.e. always there, not physically removable), just disappeared
from Windows sight. No longer accessible, HD Sentinel didn't see it
either. Rebooted, and everything was fine, it came back. But there were
no warnings in SMART about that drive. Is there something in the Windows
logs that I can see about this?

Try to replace your cables... You said that you have seen this behaviour on
XP and now on Win7... Often the most stupid thing is giving you the
headaches and produces those 'ghosty' behaviour nobody can understand...

In the case of the IDE cables, that had already been tried before, and
it made no difference. Haven't really tried it with the SATA cables, but
none of these SATA cables are from the same batch, they were all
independently obtained as drives were added.

Would the number of drives in the system be a problem here? I got 5
internal hard drives (all SATA), 3 external hard drives (1 eSATA, 2
USB), plus 2 optical drives (all IDE). I got a 650W PSU for it.

Depends how the PSU divvies up the 12V rail. Spinning up eight drives
might be too much for it? Measure 12V rail on startup. If you not using
high power draw graphics card, you could power some HDDs from that 12V
connection.

Whatever happened to staggered spinup? Old SCSI drives used to do it,
but I dunno if there's a BIOS option for that.

Grant.

Yousuf Khan wrote:
lid wrote:
Yousuf Khan kenjka:
Something strange just happened recently, under Windows 7, although
I have seen it happen under Windows XP before too. A hard drive
that's internal (i.e. always there, not physically removable), just
disappeared from Windows sight. No longer accessible, HD Sentinel
didn't see it either. Rebooted, and everything was fine, it came
back. But there were no warnings in SMART about that drive. Is
there something in the Windows logs that I can see about this?

Try to replace your cables... You said that you have seen this
behaviour on XP and now on Win7... Often the most stupid thing is
giving you the headaches and produces those 'ghosty' behaviour
nobody can understand...

In the case of the IDE cables, that had already been tried before, and
it made no difference. Haven't really tried it with the SATA cables,
but none of these SATA cables are from the same batch, they were all
independently obtained as drives were added.

Would the number of drives in the system be a problem here?

Unlikely given that a warm boot fixed it.

I got 5 internal hard drives (all SATA), 3 external hard drives (1 eSATA, 2 USB), plus 2 optical drives (all IDE). I
got a 650W PSU for it.

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:07:05 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:
lid wrote:
Yousuf Khan kenjka:
Something strange just happened recently, under Windows 7, although
I have seen it happen under Windows XP before too. A hard drive
that's internal (i.e. always there, not physically removable), just
disappeared from Windows sight. No longer accessible, HD Sentinel
didn't see it either. Rebooted, and everything was fine, it came
back. But there were no warnings in SMART about that drive. Is
there something in the Windows logs that I can see about this?

Try to replace your cables... You said that you have seen this
behaviour on XP and now on Win7... Often the most stupid thing is
giving you the headaches and produces those 'ghosty' behaviour
nobody can understand...

In the case of the IDE cables, that had already been tried before, and
it made no difference. Haven't really tried it with the SATA cables,
but none of these SATA cables are from the same batch, they were all
independently obtained as drives were added.

Would the number of drives in the system be a problem here?

Unlikely given that a warm boot fixed it.

Draw more power when they're cold? Does reboot spin down the drives?
(I forgot).

Grant.

I got 5 internal hard drives (all SATA), 3 external hard drives (1 eSATA, 2 USB), plus 2 optical drives (all IDE). I
got a 650W PSU for it.

Grant wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Yousuf Khan wrote
lid wrote:

Yousuf Khan kenjka:
Something strange just happened recently, under Windows 7,
although I have seen it happen under Windows XP before too. A
hard drive that's internal (i.e. always there, not physically
removable), just disappeared from Windows sight. No longer
accessible, HD Sentinel didn't see it either. Rebooted, and
everything was fine, it came back. But there were no warnings in
SMART about that drive. Is there something in the Windows logs
that I can see about this?

Try to replace your cables... You said that you have seen this
behaviour on XP and now on Win7... Often the most stupid thing is
giving you the headaches and produces those 'ghosty' behaviour
nobody can understand...

In the case of the IDE cables, that had already been tried before,
and it made no difference. Haven't really tried it with the SATA
cables, but none of these SATA cables are from the same batch,
they were all independently obtained as drives were added.

Would the number of drives in the system be a problem here?

Unlikely given that a warm boot fixed it.

Draw more power when they're cold?

He appears to have said that the drives went away well after
the initial reboot, and then came back after a warm boot, so
there shouldnt have been any time when they were cold
because he says he leaves the system on all the time.

Does reboot spin down the drives? (I forgot).

No it doesnt with ATA drives.

I got 5 internal hard drives (all SATA), 3 external hard drives (1 eSATA,
2 USB), plus 2 optical drives (all IDE). I got a 650W PSU for it.

lid wrote:
Grant kenjka:
Unlikely given that a warm boot fixed it.

Draw more power when they're cold? Does reboot spin down the drives?
(I forgot).

Loose soldering joint on some specific drive?

It wasnt just one drive that went missing.

On Mar 22, 5:12*pm, wrote:
5 internal SATA drives? Which power supply you've got? Brand is what I'd
like to know...

It's a Zalman. The same people who make those fancy overclocker heat
sinks for processors.

External drives have their own PSU, so they don't count... But 5 internal
drives + 2 optical drives could be the problem, even on 650W PSU if it's
low-quality... But somehow, I think you've got a good PSU...

It's a quad-rail PSU. Sorry, it's not a 650W, it's a 600W PSU, my
mistake. No matter, that's just Zalman's conservative rating, another
manufacturer, OCZ, repackages the same PSU and rates it at 700W.

I did have a problem with low-quality PSU's in the past, I used to go
for cheap 400W units based on price mostly, until I started noticing
that certain instabilities were being caused. So I decided to properly
invest in this one, this time. However, even still, a single 12V rail
can only supply upto 18.5A, which is 222W. I think two of those rails
are dedicated to the motherboard, and one for a high-end video card
(don't have one of those), and the rest for anything else, which
probably means the hard drives. Is 222W enough? I would've thought so.

So, you said that only one drive were disappearing or it's something random
and every drive disappears from time to time?

It just happened once, it isn't a recurring thing (yet). But once is
enough in this case. It's not supposed to do that at all, not unless
the drive itself dies which didn't happen.

Yousuf Khan

bbbl67 wrote:
On Mar 22, 5:12 pm, wrote:
5 internal SATA drives? Which power supply you've got? Brand is what
I'd like to know...

It's a Zalman. The same people who make those fancy overclocker heat
sinks for processors.

External drives have their own PSU, so they don't count... But 5
internal drives + 2 optical drives could be the problem, even on
650W PSU if it's low-quality... But somehow, I think you've got a
good PSU...

It's a quad-rail PSU. Sorry, it's not a 650W, it's a 600W PSU, my
mistake. No matter, that's just Zalman's conservative rating, another
manufacturer, OCZ, repackages the same PSU and rates it at 700W.

I did have a problem with low-quality PSU's in the past, I used to go
for cheap 400W units based on price mostly, until I started noticing
that certain instabilities were being caused. So I decided to properly
invest in this one, this time. However, even still, a single 12V rail
can only supply upto 18.5A, which is 222W. I think two of those rails
are dedicated to the motherboard, and one for a high-end video card
(don't have one of those), and the rest for anything else, which
probably means the hard drives. Is 222W enough? I would've thought so.

So, you said that only one drive were disappearing or it's something
random and every drive disappears from time to time?

It just happened once, it isn't a recurring thing (yet). But once is
enough in this case. It's not supposed to do that at all, not unless
the drive itself dies which didn't happen.

Thats also a classic with memory leak problems, they dont
happen that often, only after quite a while after the reboot.

On Mar 23, 7:26*pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
bbbl67 wrote:
On Mar 22, 5:12 pm, wrote:
5 internal SATA drives? Which power supply you've got? Brand is what
I'd like to know...

It's a Zalman. The same people who make those fancy overclocker heat
sinks for processors.

External drives have their own PSU, so they don't count... But 5
internal drives + 2 optical drives could be the problem, even on
650W PSU if it's low-quality... But somehow, I think you've got a
good PSU...

It's a quad-rail PSU. Sorry, it's not a 650W, it's a 600W PSU, my
mistake. No matter, that's just Zalman's conservative rating, another
manufacturer, OCZ, repackages the same PSU and rates it at 700W.

I did have a problem with low-quality PSU's in the past, I used to go
for cheap 400W units based on price mostly, until I started noticing
that certain instabilities were being caused. So I decided to properly
invest in this one, this time. However, even still, a single 12V rail
can only supply upto 18.5A, which is 222W. I think two of those rails
are dedicated to the motherboard, and one for a high-end video card
(don't have one of those), and the rest for anything else, which
probably means the hard drives. Is 222W enough? I would've thought so.

So, you said that only one drive were disappearing or it's something
random and every drive disappears from time to time?

It just happened once, it isn't a recurring thing (yet). But once is
enough in this case. It's not supposed to do that at all, not unless
the drive itself dies which didn't happen.

Thats also a classic with memory leak problems, they dont
happen that often, only after quite a while after the reboot.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Have you eliminated any drive mapping problems. I have noted drives
disappearing when there is a conflict with a network mapped drive, or
a drive SUBST command. I am not sure if this will happen with an
internal drive.

Michael

wrote:
On Mar 23, 7:26 pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
bbbl67 wrote:
On Mar 22, 5:12 pm, wrote:
5 internal SATA drives? Which power supply you've got? Brand is
what I'd like to know...

It's a Zalman. The same people who make those fancy overclocker heat
sinks for processors.

External drives have their own PSU, so they don't count... But 5
internal drives + 2 optical drives could be the problem, even on
650W PSU if it's low-quality... But somehow, I think you've got a
good PSU...

It's a quad-rail PSU. Sorry, it's not a 650W, it's a 600W PSU, my
mistake. No matter, that's just Zalman's conservative rating,
another manufacturer, OCZ, repackages the same PSU and rates it at
700W.

I did have a problem with low-quality PSU's in the past, I used to
go for cheap 400W units based on price mostly, until I started
noticing that certain instabilities were being caused. So I decided
to properly invest in this one, this time. However, even still, a
single 12V rail can only supply upto 18.5A, which is 222W. I think
two of those rails are dedicated to the motherboard, and one for a
high-end video card (don't have one of those), and the rest for
anything else, which probably means the hard drives. Is 222W
enough? I would've thought so.

So, you said that only one drive were disappearing or it's
something random and every drive disappears from time to time?

It just happened once, it isn't a recurring thing (yet). But once is
enough in this case. It's not supposed to do that at all, not unless
the drive itself dies which didn't happen.

Thats also a classic with memory leak problems, they dont
happen that often, only after quite a while after the reboot.

Have you eliminated any drive mapping problems.

Unlikely to affect two drives.

I have noted drives disappearing when there is a conflict
with a network mapped drive, or a drive SUBST command.
I am not sure if this will happen with an internal drive.

Yes it can.

wrote:
Have you eliminated any drive mapping problems. I have noted drives
disappearing when there is a conflict with a network mapped drive, or
a drive SUBST command. I am not sure if this will happen with an
internal drive.


Yeah, that's not going to be the problem. I'd have had to have actually
tried to map a network drive at the time this internal drive
disappeared. The internal drive just disappeared by itself, and as I
said before there are entries in the Windows System log showing when it
happened. It showed controller problems at the time, with no other
details beyond that.

Yousuf Khan