disappearing hard drive?

danielwalding

danielwalding

Active member
Hi there,

I turned on my computer yesterday and my secondary hard drive (250gb Sata) isn't showing up on 'my computer' and all the links to the drive aren't working. I have never seen anything like this and i'm a bit stuck about what to do? anyone got any suggestions? could this mean the hard drive has failed? its only a few months old as well.

any help would be appreciated

thanks, dw

edit: sorry, accidently posted it twice, please delete
 
First i'm going to assume that you are working on a windows machine.
If so you want to first go into your bios on your machine. Normally this is located by pressing something like the del key when your computer boots. In the bios you want to find where it list your drives then see if the drive if being recognized. If it is being recognized them you know that the drive is working.
 
sorry, yes i am working on a windows machine. i went into the bios and the drive is not being recognised. only the system drive is being recognised. does this mean that it has failed?
 
Sounds pretty likely. But before you freak out, check to make sure all the cables are plugged in securely. Also try different cables (both power and SATA).
 
Also if you have an external hard drive enclosure you can try taking the drive out and putting in in the external enclosure and that might tell you some things as well.
Have you noticed any grinding noises or any problem with speed or writing to that drive ?
 
ok we'll ill try those things out. i haven't noticed any problems with the drive at all, its been working perfectly since i got it a few months ago, even the past week up untill now. fortunately everything important on it is backed up. i wonder if it would still be under warranty?
 
A crazy thought...are you putting your machine in stand-by mode instead of the full turn-off option?

When I turn off my computer with the stand-by option, when I turn it back on I can't see one of my drives anywhere. A reboot is required to get the drive available. It's weird.

I have no idea why this happens.
 
happened plenty of times on the PC's ive had the unfortunate pleasure of working with/ owning and id say 7 times outta 10 its just a cable/jumper problem. be sure your power supply can handle the total wattage in the system. sometimes when you buy an already made PC the power supply is going to be the cheapest one they can find to have the minimum power to the components already installed. and when you put something new in it, it cant power it, or barely can.

did you install anything else ?
 
I've had the same problem. I never did figured out the problem though. Power supply could be my problem since I built it myself :huh:

It has happened twice with the same drive. Both times I opened the poor little PC up and gave it a good cleaning (compressed air). Both times this fixed the problem. Kind of like the magic that occurs when you blow into a broken CD player and suddenly it works again.:thumbsup:

The good news it that all the info was still there (in my case anyway).
 
thanks for the help guys. its working again. i opened up the computer and had a bit of a play around with the cables and cleaned all the dust out and now it works again fine and everything is still there on the drive. very, very weird. but at least its still alive.

thanks again for all the help, much appreciated
 
good to hear, not because i care about your data, but because i was right!!!

Just kidding, :) good to know tho
 
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