Windows 7 - Internal hard drive keeps disappearing

I upgraded from Win XP to Windows 7 64 bit about a month ago (I did a clean install as I've always had issues with in place upgrades). My machine has four hard drives total, two internal SATA drives, and two external USB drives. For some reason my secondary internal drive, a WD 500 GB SATA drive (nothing fancy), keeps disappearing randomly while windows is running. This started about a week ago, it ran ok for the first 2 weeks or so.

The drive comes back fine and dandy if I completely shut down the machine and then boot it back up. The drive stays until some random moment when Windows doesn't see it anymore. Now, if I do a simple Restart the drive doesn't show up, ONLY after I shut down completely, and push the power button back on, does this work. There is nothing in the System logs, no error messages, nothing, it just vanishes and is completely random.

Please help as I REALLY don't want to go back to XP but I've checked the hard drive with windows and other programs and it never reports any problems, the BIOS detects no problems, even Windows recognizes it for a while, then nothing...

Hello zdawg, and welcome to Seven Forums.

I use to have this happen to one of my internal SATA HDD drives. It turned out that updating my AHCI SATA driver for my motherboard to the latest version resolved the issue for me. You might also update the motherboard chipset driver to the latest version as well to be safe.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Did you try reseating the HDD. Remove all cable from it, then reconnect them. Also disconnect the SATA cable from the motherboard, then reconnect it. You can also give SeaTools a try. I know its from Seagate, but it works with all HDD.

This may not be the same problem but I have 5 hard drives with a total of a ridiculous amount of 5.25 TB storage. Anyways I noticed that 3 of the drives were seen in bios and in the device manager yet they turned out to be unallocated so they did not show up as a logical or primary drive. After spinning my wheels for a while I loaded my old seagate disk utility from 2007. This searched and asked me if I wanted to fix these drives, one by one. This did correct the problem and now each drive is seen and works great. Just make sure they are set to logical and NTFS unless you plan on running an OS on them then you would want to run that drive as primary. I think you might find some download the sea tools as above...and why I edited the post.

I used the original disk dated 05/07 with part number 100469279

The disks are now working but everything was lost on them, as I did not have anything to begin with it did not bother me.

Bump,

I have the same exact issue as the OP, Did Shawn's method work?