is it dead?

I think a drive just died, but I am having difficulty diagnosing it.

I have(had) a 500 gb (forgot manufacture) SATA drive that I used to store Hi-Def movies. I went to watch one, and MPC locked up, re-opened explorer to launch the movie in VLC, and explorer locked up. At this point, uTorrent, Trillian, and Firefox all still worked fine, taskbar worked, but explorer was locked up. I will note that uTorrent was reading an I/O error or files missing error on 3 of my files to that drive, but the others listed fine. The drive was about 95% full.

I was unable to work around the explorer lock-up, and did a soft restart. Sys booted fine, but W7 was unable to locate the 500 gb drive (all other drives show fine and work fine). restart, getting back into BIOS, which does not display the drive. I did an auto-detect, and it immediately saw the drive again. Back into windows, still no drive.

So, where we are at now, is the BIOS sees the drive, but windows does not. Disk Management shows me all other drives, but not my 500. I can't tell if it is spinning or not as there are to many other drives in the case.

If it died, oh well, I just want to know so I can pull it. No critical data was lost, I backup my C drive for that :)

lordkentar said:

I think a drive just died, but I am having difficulty diagnosing it.

I have(had) a 500 gb (forgot manufacture) SATA drive that I used to store Hi-Def movies. I went to watch one, and MPC locked up, re-opened explorer to launch the movie in VLC, and explorer locked up. At this point, uTorrent, Trillian, and Firefox all still worked fine, taskbar worked, but explorer was locked up. I will note that uTorrent was reading an I/O error or files missing error on 3 of my files to that drive, but the others listed fine. The drive was about 95% full.

I was unable to work around the explorer lock-up, and did a soft restart. Sys booted fine, but W7 was unable to locate the 500 gb drive (all other drives show fine and work fine). restart, getting back into BIOS, which does not display the drive. I did an auto-detect, and it immediately saw the drive again. Back into windows, still no drive.

So, where we are at now, is the BIOS sees the drive, but windows does not. Disk Management shows me all other drives, but not my 500. I can't tell if it is spinning or not as there are to many other drives in the case.

If it died, oh well, I just want to know so I can pull it. No critical data was lost, I backup my C drive for that :)

Drive may not be dead, only file system which can be rebuilt. You should get a 3rd party app like uneraser to see if anything can be recovered. Plus you can always try to format it to save the drive
Ken

See if an Ubuntu live cd can read and run a boot disk like Hitachi's GST.

send it to me and i will tell you