D SATA Hard Drive disappears after random amount of time.

cheezstik said:

Any more ideas anyone?

Have you considered getting a replacement drive? Maybe it's just aging.

You haven't posted the name of the hard drive - find out the make of the drive eg seagate etc then go to the manufactures site - support - and find a utility that will test the drive - with seagate drives you can download 2 types, firstly use the utility that works within windows7 OS to test the drive - if it passes the drive is ok - then you can make a bootable cd with the other utility if necessary, and ground zero the drive to remove every single bit of data from the drive - you then have to re initialise the drive in diskmanagement before you can use it, you then need to create a partition. You would have to back up the data firstly for this, so i would firstly suggest going into diskmanagment and report its status back to see if it can be fixed from there, ie if it passes the the first test, and is not found to be faulty.
If its faulty and under warranty you can send it back to the manufacturer and they will replace the drive with no charge.

You may need to use the bootable cd utility if you have trouble with it finding the disk with the windows 7 OS utility - it has the same tests available, but more which includes wiping the disk to zero.

Could not believe it today when THE SAME THING happened to me again, as has been happening for the past 2 months... nearly identical to this thread's OP's experience.

I had just awakened my ASUS P5Q3 system from hibernation (which I place the system in before walking away, anytime I know I'm not going to need it again for hours or longer) and everything started up fine. Then I got into my email program, received new mail, and clicked on a "+" to open up a thread for which there was a new reply.

Instantly, the "+" expansion process froze, a blank line appeared on the screen, and my system was seemingly frozen... except that the mouse continued to work perfectly. But I could not get into anything else, or open anything else, or elicit any response from the system.

I had a bad feeling about the fact that probably the drive and/or SATA connector/cable I'd been fighting with for 2 months now had probably flaked out again.

Anyway, I took my usual "kick start" approach, of powering the machine off (holding the ON/OFF button for 4 seconds), pulling the power cord out of the machine for a while, plugging the power cord back in, and then restarting the system.

Not surprisingly, there was yet another one of the now-familiar BIOS-related indications that one of my two SATA drives was not functioning correctly... BUT THIS TIME IS WAS MY OTHER ONE!!! Unfortunately, this is not hard disk #2 where I have Win7 installed, but hard disk #1 where I have WinXP installed (and which contains the "active" WinXP partition where boot manager for WinXP and Win7 lives).

This is the same problem as before, but this time for my second SATA drive! Note that throughout all of this my third U320 SCSI drive (on an Adaptec 29320-alp controller) has continued to perform flawlessly. In fact, in my 17 years of building/playing with my PC's, I've never had any trouble with SCSI drives. It's only in the past two years that I've started phasing them out and replacing them with SATA drives that I have begun to see these odd SATA-related anomalies... at least on this one ASUS P5Q3 machine. Fortunately, no such anomalies have ever occurred on my other Supermicro C2SBX HTPC machine (which now has three large SATA drives along with one remaining large U320 SCSI drive on an Adaptec 39320-r controller).

Anyway, quite stunned but undaunted by the now-familiar SATA drive/connector/cable failure, I took my now-familiar second-level attempt at recovery. I once again opened the case, removed and reseated the SATA cable onto the drive connector, pulled and reseated the other end of the SATA cable onto the motherboard connector (without changing SATA ports, just removing and reseating the cable), and then closed everything up and restarted the machine.

Not surprisingly (and very thankfully), now the BIOS had no trouble talking to that hard disk #1 and I was once again able to get to boot manager (from the "active" partition on that drive) and boot to Win7.

Once again... case closed, disaster averted. However I'm now suspicious that the P5Q3 motherboard itself, and its SATA controller, which is perhaps at fault.

My nephew has advised me that there is a known defect in Intel's Southbridge chipset which is at fault, and that there is a "recall" announced. My P5Q3 uses an ICH10R Southbridge chipset to support my 6 SATA ports. I have been unable to find out for myself what he's talking about, but I will phone him today to ask about it.

[EDIT: spoken with him now, and it turns out to be Sandy Bridge, not Southbridge, where this SATA recall issue applies)

Anyway, for me it doesn't now appear to be drive-related, or SATA-connector related, or SATA-cable related, as the same problem has now occurred on BOTH of the SATA drives in my machine, which have been plugged into 4 of the 6 connectors on the board, all of which have begun to "fail" the same way over the past 2 months.

Very suspicious.

whest said:

You haven't posted the name of the hard drive - find out the make of the drive eg seagate etc then go to the manufactures site - support - and find a utility that will test the drive - with seagate drives you can download 2 types, firstly use the utility that works within windows7 OS to test the drive - if it passes the drive is ok - then you can make a bootable cd with the other utility if necessary, and ground zero the drive to remove every single bit of data from the drive - you then have to re initialise the drive in diskmanagement before you can use it, you then need to create a partition. You would have to back up the data firstly for this, so i would firstly suggest going into diskmanagment and report its status back to see if it can be fixed from there, ie if it passes the the first test, and is not found to be faulty.
If its faulty and under warranty you can send it back to the manufacturer and they will replace the drive with no charge.

You may need to use the bootable cd utility if you have trouble with it finding the disk with the windows 7 OS utility - it has the same tests available, but more which includes wiping the disk to zero.

The hard drive is seagate barracuda 7200.5 200gb. Its not very popular and you probably wont find much hits on google. It came as a secondary drive to an old 2005 intel desktop and i just put it in my new custom built pc because 80gb isnt anywhere near enough for me and my primary drive right now is already nearly full.

Im using seatools to do certain scans on my barracuda now. I just finished smart test and it said it was ok.

Do the short drive self test and then the long one if it passes the short test- mine passed the smart test but failed the short test - then i had it replaced without charge. If it passes whatever is wrong with it will be fixed if you wipe the disk to zero using the bootable cd.

You might try the latest chipset drivers from this site if it passes the test before you consider zeroing the drive -
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download M4A89GTD PRO/USB3

dsperber said:

cheezstik said:

Any more ideas anyone?

Have you considered getting a replacement drive? Maybe it's just aging.

I experienced similar problem with WD Caviar Green 750 GB first and, after replacing the unit by Seagate 1TB problem moved to WD Caviar Green 1TB. The 750 GB HD was not faulty even tough when the HD was recovered after disappearing the Acronis Data Lifeguard reported errors in the short test sometimes. Now I am using this dummy faulty disk as external one via USB interface and I have not experienced any problem.
Looking at the MS support (You receive various Stop error messages in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 when you try to resume a computer that has a large SATA hard disk), and after replacing cables, connectors, avoiding hibernation, HD sleeping and so one, I understood that problem could be generated by problems on the HD power. I realized that I was feeding 4 units via one single output of the power supply (I added two additional connectors to the two standard ones). Three weeks ago I reconfigured the power scheme using two power supply outputs, each one feeding only 2 units as per standard configuration, and problem has disappeared (at least for the moment).
I have not tested via oscilloscope but probably the current peaks appearing during big HDs activity exceeds the power supply capabilities and disk is not able to get the running status inside the expected leadtime. I have a 450 watts power supply which, could be, is stressed enough with all installed devices.
I hope this helps you.
Best regards. Jose.

i have the same issues, it's hard to say what the issue is, but one thing is sure in my case: it's not the drive dying (smart test shows less then 1 hour of uptime, it's brand new.)

to answer someone's question about a usb connected drive: yes it will work fine and at full capacity without issue, as the sata controller will be in the drive it's self, and usb doesn't care if it's 4 bytes, 4 TB, or 4 EB it's all the same to USB.

someone said it was possibly power related, they only have a 450 watt power supply, which is low these days with all the stuff we put in our computers. I have a 1000 watt power supply in my build, my lowest power supply is 250 watts. (an old 98/xp computer)

anyway there's still an issue with this type of problem it seams. after a few hours it's just "gone".

anyone have anything new to shed on this?

t

Hi,

Problem fully disappeared after power reconfiguration. I maintained the 450 W power supply for more than one year till it died and it was replaced by a 700W.

After this incident I have replaced several times the HDs in order to increase the storage capacity (I am using the involved PC as a data repository) but I maintained all time the same cables.

Last week I experienced again the problem, affecting a 2TB WD green unit. The root, in this case, was the signal cable due to the fact that the connector did not fit in a secure way (slight movement). I replaced the cable by a brand new one and problem was solved. Now the cable connector does not move.

I hope this helps you.

Best regards. Jose.