HDD wont save anything

[mitis3]

last week i upgraded my pc with new motherboard, graphics card, proccesor and a SSD hard drive. i got the 120gb ssd hard drive because it is enough for the OS and important programmes. but i also wanted some more storage and i had and 220gb HDD laying around. so i putted the HDD in my computer now is the problem that i can see the drive and put files on it, instal games on it. but when i restart my computer all the files i put on the Hdd drive are gone. i have already searched the internet for a sollution but i couldn't find one that worked for me. so i hope any of you guys can help me out.
(sorry for my bad english)

 

[TVeblen]

Could you post a screenshot of your Disk Management window? Be sure to expand the window so we can see and read everything.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html
How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista

Be sure the hard drive is connected. You could save a few file copies to it to help the test.

 

[mitis3]

well here's a screenshot of the disk management window it is in dutch tho and if it isnt connected i wouldnt show up in the disk management window, right?

 

[TVeblen]

OK. Thanks. You have got 2 partitions marked ACTIVE. Windows does not like that. You should start by removing the ACTIVE flag from the second HDD partition (E):
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/197157-partition-mark-inactive.html

Having 2 ACTIVE partitions usually cause boot problems. This is the first time I've heard of a problem like yours so I'm not sure this is the cause. But it is not good anyway, so we might as well fix that.

Is there any data on that 2nd hard drive you need? Because if there is not then it might make sense to wipe that disk clean and create a new partition(s) anyway. Do you think you will ever use that Recovery Partition?

 

[mitis3]

how do i change it from active and i'm not gonna use the recovery partition so im willing to wipe it.

 

[Kaktussoft]

how do i change it from active and i'm not gonna use the recovery partition so im willing to wipe it.

right click the 12GB parition in disk managemrnt and click "remove". Works?

 

[Kaktussoft]

From http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/783-elevated-command-prompt.html

diskpart
select  vol  e
inactive
exit

Volume E is inactive now.

diskpart
select disk 1
list part
(which partition has size 12GB? Assume number is X)
select part X
detail part
(sure this is the correct partition? very sure it's the 12GB partition?)
delete part
exit

 

[dsperber]

Although it's not typical to have two ACTIVE partitions, this is often what happens when a drive previously used as a boot drive is re-purposed and installed into a new machine as a second "data" drive. This isn't really problematic because the BIOS boot sequence shows the correct #1 drive in the new machine as the one to go to, in order to then find the ACTIVE partition and start the boot process.

The second ACTIVE partition (on the second "data" drive") doesn't participate in this story, so while I agree it's not normal and can't do anything good, it's really benign and harmless.

Of course this will all be moot once the second "data" drive is simply re-formatted as one large partition, which by default will NOT BE MARKED ACTIVE.


More interesting is the fact that the 100MB "system reserved" (ACTIVE partition on drive 0) partition has been given a drive letter of D. Sure, this also is normally benign and harmless, but it's not what Windows would do. The 100MB size says it was produced by a standard Windows install-from-scratch onto an initially completely empty drive (i.e. the new SSD), but it should not have gotten a drive letter of anything. The "system reserved" ACTIVE partition (where Boot Manager is placed) is normally left without a drive letter, to protect against accidental corruption or damage or alteration while running under Windows (booted from C).

So, did you manually assign that drive letter of D? I'm guessing you must have.

And are you sure you're looking at your E partition for "changes" and "data" saved to it, and not by accident actually looking at D??

For security, I would recommend removing the drive letter of D from the "system reserved" partition. You can also just run DISKMGMT.MSC, right-click on that partition, and choose "change drive letter..." and push the REMOVE button on the dialog.


Also, suggest you install Partition Wizard as an excellent tool. It is used (with its VERY INTUITIVE GUI presentation) in place of DISKMGMT and DISKPART for most tasks that these two Windows components would also have been used for. But with Partition Wizard it's VERY HARD TO MAKE A MISTAKE, and the operations are GUI-intuitive through its right-click context menus and list of available operations on the left side of the screen.

Also, you create your list of operations (one or more, in sequence) to be performed, and then when you're finally all set you push the APPLY button. Nothing happens until APPLY, and you have UNDO available if you want to make revisions or deletions to your list of operations.

Again, this highly recommended program could handle your desire to just delete the two partitions on the second "data" drive, and create one NTFS partition. It could also remove the drive letter from D.

 

[Kaktussoft]

#8 and Time warp - SSD drive not saving after cold boot/restart - The Corsair User Forums

 

[TVeblen]

I've been involved in a few threads where the system was ignoring drives that had a second active partition. Removing the active flag solved the problem. So it can be an issue.

I believe that it is system dependent. Meaning that some systems - their setup, their BIOS, their settings - can't handle multiple actives. But other systems, particularly the newer systems with UEFI - a firmware that fully expects and can work with multi-OS setups - have no problem with it and it can be benign. That is why I always ask and don't assume anything.

I highly doubt it has anything to do with the OP's problem, but you never know. Seen stranger.

 

[TVeblen]

Also- OP is having this problem on the spinner, if I read that first post correctly.
Can the SSD affect it?

 

[dsperber]

Also- OP is having this problem on the spinner, if I read that first post correctly.
Can the SSD affect it?

I would think these are unrelated.

I "built" a Lenovo M93p, adding an internal SSD to go along with the delivered 1TB spinner, copying the contents of the delivered spinner over to the SSD and changing drive #1 in the BIOS boot sequence to point to the SSD instead. The copied "system reserved" partition now on the SSD was marked ACTIVE, same as things looked originally on original spiiner.

I also then deleted all partitions from the spinner (thus erasing the previous "system reserved" ACTIVE partition along with the C-partition and Lenovo recovery partition), and re-partitioned into two normal "data" partitions.

No problem at all even with legacy (non-UEFI) BIOS, but as you point out the absence of a second ACTIVE partition on a second drive could be the answer. But, clearly there are many variables here, and this is a VERY RARE symptom being described so who knows what the explanation is.

 

[TVeblen]

That is for sure! I am baffled by the symptoms as described.

It almost sounds like the files are being saved to RAM, then lost when the power is cut out. I can't imagine why a physical hard drive would lose data on restart.

mitis3: Is it doing this on restart, or only when shut completely off?
And what size are the files you have saved to the drive? Large or small?

Here's what I'm thinking now: if the files written are small enough to fit on the drive's cache, could it be that the drive is not writing the cache?

 

[dsperber]

That is for sure! I am baffled by the symptoms as described.

It almost sounds like the files are being saved to RAM, then lost when the power is cut out. I can't imagine why a physical hard drive would lose data on restart.

Interesting point.

Samsung SSD drives come with Samsung Magician software, to provide improved performance of the drive. One of the Samsung Magician optional features (which I myself use on two machines, both of which use Samsung Pro SSDs, one 256GB along with a 1TB second spinner data drive, and the other 512GB in my laptop all by itself) is something called "rapid mode". This functionality uses a portion of machine RAM (assuming you have a lot of it, with much of it typically unused) as an in-memory cache buffer, to improve SSD performance, handling of deleted files, etc.

Now I'm not pointing fingers at "rapid mode", but your mention of in-memory cache and potential loss if the machine powers off before any unwritten buffers can be flushed out to the SSD, well it does seem potentially possible in concept.

Of course I don't have this problem on either of my own two machines when I restart or shut down, both of which use Samsung 840 SSDs with "rapid mode" enabled. Actually, both machines also use "over provisioning", which is a second function of Samsung Magician that uses about 10% of the drive capacity (which remains unallocated to partitions, but rather is allocated to the "over provisioning" performance improvement feature) to again improve overall SSD performance and especially with respect to deleted files.

In other words, in my own limited SSD experience, I've never seen "loss of data" on either SSD or in the case of the M93p with a second spinner drive, no "loss of data" on that second drive either.

It would be interesting to see if data was "lost" using some other bootable media, say to a command prompt from a standalone Windows installation DVD, to see if a file that got copied or renamed or updated or deleted had that action "retained" or lost. This would point to or exculpate Windows and/or Samsung Magician (if being used) as directly complicit in the symptom.

 

[Kaktussoft]

Reboot from some linux live cd and put a few files on the disk. Those files are gone as well after reboot?

 

[mitis3]

@dsperber: i didnt change the partion to D my self it did automatic i think.

i tried using partion wizard and removed the partion but when i restart it just resets

 

[dsperber]

i tried using partion wizard and removed the partion but when i restart it just resets

Do you mean you deleted the partition LETTER of D using Partition Wizard? Or did you use Partition Wizard to actually delete the D partition? That's not what I had talked about.

I wanted you to use DISKMGMT.MSC to REMOVE the D-letter from that partition.

Surely you didn't actually delete the partition itself, else you wouldn't have been able to boot after that since that's the ACTIVE partition where Boot Manager lives. Couldn't have done that.

Can you please use DISKMGMT.MSC and right-click on the D-partition, select "change drive letter" from the popup menu to get the CHANGE dialog which shows D as the existing drive letter, and then push the REMOVE button to remove the D letter but keep the partition (-> producing un-lettered "system reserved").

 

[mitis3]

used it on the E hard drive, but i got i gone but now i need to format the E drive to start using it but evrytime i try to format it, it says cannot finish it i put an image of my disc management with the post maybe that also helps.

 

[dsperber]

Well, at this point I'd have to say it's the hard drive itself which is simply failing.

You described it originally as "an old 220GB laying around" (it's actually probably a 250GB drive, but when formatted only provides about 232GB available as your screenshots show). Is this a SATA drive, or an IDE drive? SCSI drive? Do you know the manufacturer/model of the drive? Age of the drive?

At this point, your original "all files previously written to the drive mysteriously disappear at restart" suggests that the drive itself is either (a) write-protected, which seems impossible unless it's a hardware jumper that might have come loose and fallen off or (b) simply failing hard so that it is no longer capable of having data written to it.

Specifically, if the file system records on the drive (i.e. the complete "Table of Contents" of all files on the drive that you see with Explorer) cannot be written, then it may only APPEAR that your files have been written to the drive as long as the current Windows session is still up and running. But actually nothing got written. In other words, the in-memory cache of that drive's supposed Table of Contents could show up in Explorer giving the appearance that the files were written to the drive, at least until the next re-boot. But at restart time the drive itself is now truly read for its "Table of Contents" when it is discovered that in fact there are no files on the drive, so it now shows in Explorer as empty.

Has to be a hardware problem on the drive. My suggestion would be to just scrap it at this point, and not spend any more time trying to get it to work. New drives are inexpensive and are 100% reliable.


Just out of curiosity, what are you using to try and FORMAT it to NTFS... DISKMGMT.MSC or Partition Wizard?

I'd recommend that you at least give try Partition Wizard to do the FORMAT to NTFS (not FAT32), if you haven't already. But if the drive itself is simply failing then nothing is going to succeed trying to FORMAT it. And if you can't FORMAT it, you obviously can't write to it.

And if you can't even FORMAT the drive at this point, I think it's just a certainty that the drive is now dead.

Cut your losses and buy another drive.


NOTE: if you look at my earlier posts, I was asking you to "REMOVE THE DRIVE LETTER OF D" from that small 100MB "system reserved" partition on your 120GB SSD. You don't seem to have done that yet.

It's not really harmful to have a drive letter for that partition, but it does make it more likely and possible for you to accidentally and unwittingly write to it or do damage to it, which will be a bad thing. Certainly Windows itself would not give a drive letter to it normally, so I still don't know how that happened.

I still recommend you use DISKMGMT as described previously, to REMOVE DRIVE LETTER OF D. Don't delete the partition itself!! Just remove the drive letter of D from it.

 

[mitis3]

i have removed the letter D and now my E drive is D but what i think the problem is that the hard disk makes widows thinks that there is a OS on there. i tried diferend ways formatting it to NTFS and it is a SATA drive, but thanks for the help anyway! i think i'll buy a new one or see if i can recover a wiped harddrive from a friend but that is an other topic.