D Drive randomly dismounting.

[ether3]

Hi there, i have been running into an issue where my D drive will randomly dismount itself.

The very first time happened when i was playing Left 4 Dead while downloading a new update for steam in the background. All of a sudden steam locked up and my drive was no longer detected. It happened a second time when i went to load up another game while downloading patches through the steam client. Game locks, steam crashes, drives dismounts.
But this time it just happened out of nowhere. I was playing WoW which is on my C: drive and Steam came up and crashed. It was just running in the background and i didn't see that it was downloading anything. I have run a chkdsk on all my drives and nothing is coming up. Not sure what to do at this point but the only thing on that drive is Steam and games that i have downloaded . Event viewer is just spammed with:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation.

With one or two:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

I was able to continue to do everything that was on the C: drive with no problems whatsoever just the D drive wasn't being recognized.
Is the drive potentially dying?

 

[ether3]

No idea what is going on now. I just tried to boot steam up and explorer repeatedly crashed. Like 20 times in a row just constantly crashing and trying to restart itself until i finally ended the steam process. I have never seen anything like this. In one of my previous posts a member here suggested that my registry could possibly be busted but could it really be this bad? Could it be my D Drive as well?
Really need some help and suggest0ions.


Attached a scan from HDDScan. No idea what is wrong then. It has only happened with steam and the secondary drive. Might try a clean Windows install.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Could you give some more info on what kind of physical device the "D drive" is? Is it a second internal HDD? A partition of the same hard drive you have C on? An external HDD? Is it the Hitachi I see in your specs (as the other is an SSD)?

I've had plenty of external HDDs do exactly like that when they were not given enough power through their USB connectors. They run relatively fine when on idle (and were thus recognized and mouned by Win 7), but any serious operation and BANG, they die and dismount. Then the operation ends, and they return idle, and they mount again.

But I never had issues like that with internal drives. If that is an internal drive, trying to follow the same route, could you please fill your specs in this calculator? it should tell how much power you need to run your stuff. Then check your PSU's watts, that I don't see from your specs.

 

[ether3]

Sure, it is an internal hitachi 1tb 7200 rpm. I just reformatted and reinstalled windows and tried it out with a game on the D drive and it went down again. Dismounted the drive and locked the game. Was able to task manager out the first time. Updated my bios after that. This time i tried again and it pretty much just hardlocked the drive or something. use ctrl+alt+del to override and get to task manager but it locked up explorer and it couldnt do anything after that. Had to hard reboot.

I ran that calc and it said i needed about 520 watts total. My power supply is a xtremegear 800w. I have heard some pretty bad stuff about them so maybe that could be a problem. I had this happen a couple of months back but was able to game pretty fine and the problem only appeared once more.
Now anytime i try to play a game or get it to load a game up it will immediately dismount and sometimes just continually crash explorer. I thought it might be a busted registry and the reformatting would fix it but it seems that isnt the case. I have run multiple scans of chkdsk, smart scans, hd diagnostics and it never comes up with anything.

Would the drive dismounting itself also cause explorer to just crash? Before i formatted both drives when i booted up steam (which is on the d drive) explorer just crashed and restarted itself about 6 times before i was able to open up task manager and end the steam process. Then it stopped crashing. Im completely confused why the D drive dismounting would cause my C: drive running windows (corsair 128gb ssd) to have problems.


EDIT: I also remembered that one of the times it dismounted was when steam was just sitting in the background. I was playing a game that was installed on my C when i saw that steam crashed. When i looked at windows explorer it didnt list my D drive. I was able to do everything pretty much fine that involved my c drive and nothing seemed to interfere. After that when i tried to load a game up is when the explorer crashes began and i decided to do the reformatting.

 

[Zepher]

Possibly a bad drive. One of my drives keeps disappearing and will lock up explorer when I try to open a folder on the drive.
When it disappears, I have to reboot to get it back. Western digital is sending me a replacement, hopefully I can get it to work for a bit so I can copy my games off it.

 

[Six9siX]

in my setup 3 hdd
C-D 500gb WD blue
E-F 500gb WD black
G-H 1tb WD black

1tb hdd (g-h) disapears in explorer view from time to time
only reset help to bring it back.
Problem was a faulty sata connector on MB .

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Can also be a faulty internal power connector (cables that come from PSU), or a very crowded one. Try a different one (possibly one that does not have any other device connected to it).

Im completely confused why the D drive dismounting would cause my C: drive running windows (corsair 128gb ssd) to have problems.

explorer is the program that shows you your files and must know where everything is at any given moment to do so. If some memory device has issues, explorer is likely to crash/lockup.

 

[ether3]

I'm going to try to rewire everything once i feel a bit more up to it. It really seems to only have a problem when the drive needs some extra juice to have something written to it or for it to be read by booting up a game. I haven't had any problems with my C drive and gaming though so once i get the chance i will see what i can do.

Is there anything else i can do to see if there are problems with the HD other than the diagnostics i have run? I dont have anything on there but steam and darksiders 2. Everytime it tries to load the game, it gets to the intro sequence then locks up and dismounts. Everything is on a fresh install of windows 7 x64 and both drives were formatted.