Windows 7 - Secondary Hard Drive Disappears

I would like to apologize if this is not up to standards for the forum. Please let me know what other info I need to provide in order to help resolve this issue. This issue is really perplexing me. The hard drive just vanishes while I am using the computer. There are no error messages, or anything of that sort. I can't figure out why it is happening, and it started about 4 days ago or so. I even re-installed Windows 7 Home Premium x64 and it still not working. I have not been able to format the actual drive due to it vanishing at random times. There is no entries in the error logs and when i do a diagnostic of the drive (when it's visible) it seems fine. I have not changed my BIOS settings before it started happening, and the only software that I installed during the same timeframe was truecrypt. I highly doubt that it is causing the vanishing hard drive trick or anything like that, since I have not used it on this computer yet, and did nothing of the sort with the other computers that I have used it on. Thanks for taking the time to help if you can, or at least reading this.

Hello Admiral, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Double check in your Advanced Power Plan Settings to see if you may have the Turn off hard disk after idle option set to X amount of minutes. If so, change it to Never to see if that may help.

Hard Drive - Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle or Never

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for the quick response. Unfortunately, although the hard drive was turning off after 20 minutes due to that setting, it is still disappearing. It disappeared when I was unzipping an archive, and it vanished in the middle of the process. I restarted the computer and the basic things like that. Any other ideas about why this is happening? it seems random in when it happens. Sometimes 10 minutes after i restart, other times hours.

*Edit*

My hard drive re-connected itself at about 12:40am 11/27/11, and I cannot fathom why. Any information as to why this is happening would be much appreciated

You might test to see if there may be an issue with the power and data cables connected to the HDD by replacing them with different ones to see if it still disappears on you afterwards.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to work either :-/ I even took the drive and placed it in an external enclosure and it did not have the issue, so I now know it is not the drive either. I will attempt to re-format the drive and see if that helps (if it sticks around long enough)

Have you also tried connecting it to a different SATA port on the motherboard to see if it may be an issue with that port?

I have not tried different ports or anything like that, just reseated them for a second time and so far, I have not encountered the issue at hand. I will mark this as solved. So thank you for your time with this.

That's great news Admiral. I'm happy to hear that it seems to be sorted so far.

Thank you. I'll post a response in a few days if everything seems to be holding out alright.

It looks like everything is holding steady, even when I added a solid state to the system.