External Hard Drive issue cannot stay detected

ComputerGeek said:

I just skimmed your thread so apologies if i overlooked any detail but here are some thoughts

1. Have you tried the drive on a different PC? Determine if it's truly a drive problem or PC may be part of the problem
2. Have you tried the drive while other USB devices (other then mouse/keyboard) are disconneted. Some USB issues can be power related
3. Have you checked for any BIOS updates for your machine?
4. Any chipset driver updates? You can reinstall them as well
5. I'd also go into device manager, right click each ROOT hub, go to Power Management tab. Don't allow the computer to turn off this device to save power

Thank you for the post ComputerGeek as for your queries

Yes I have tried the drive on a different PC initially. It had the same of popping up as detected and instantly not being detected within secs.
I tried with all other USB not connected apart from mouse/keyboard had the same issue.
BIOS and all drivers are already updated.
I have checked the ROOT hub in device manager none were marked to reserve/save power all were working at full speed.

Now since the drive is connected via a SATA cable I dont think the USB Root will be an issue for it.

So gimme your thoughts.

Again started facing the issue the drive again stopped being listed in my list of HD's

I went into device manager and scanned for hardware changes and then it came back on for sometime and the same pattern repeats stays on for a while and then goes off the grid without any warning I am using this drive for seeding purpose only and have only put data that I am seeding to the many sites I am a member of incase something goes wrong with the drive I can live without that data .....

Then I again noticed another weird thing that is most disturbing for me and I cannot seem to get around to see what's causing it. The drive is connected via a SATA cable have tried 2-4 different cables and then I used the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostic software. My drive that is (Drive X) is listed there but it shows that it shows its connectivity via IDE (see screenshot)



Can someone please shed some light on to this issue. Or how to permanently resolve this once and for all.

I'm not sure why you think it's IDE from those snapshots (maybe i'm missing something?).

To see how your devices connect to one another, in Device Manager menu click View->Device by connection. Expand the ACPI devices till you see the PCI bus. Then expand the PCI bus. Now expand the rest till you find your disk. I'm guessing (as is my case) you'll find it connected via the SATA controller.

As to your problem, I don't really know But one other test you might try, create a Knoppix Live CD and boot into it. Connect your drive via USB. If the drive is still problematic under Knoppix then it must be computer hardware or BIOS.

I finally figured it out my motherboard had some issue with it. Since then now I have a new mother board without and the drive is being detected without any issue.

OK, I am not sure whether I am right but these are my thoughts on the issue.

On some motherboards there were two different controller chips each serving a set of SATA ports. One specific chip of a company - I don't remember the name exactly. Is it Marvel??? - was always giving problems. When the HDD was connected to a SATA port controlled by the other controller the problem vanished. I remember having seen some threads on this issue.

Just check and report whether the old motherboard had two controller chips. Of course this is a post-mortem but it is good for us to know whether this was the problem.