TSGL: Hard drive not in good spirits

[Alan Mitchell]

Had a similar problem not long ago, albeit with PATA drives. Seems like my
system would periodically loose it's ability to see the drives, so I'd
switch the PATA1 and PATA2 connectors on the motherboard and all would be
well for another month or so. Finally, in desperation I pulled out one of my
external enclosures and placed each of my hard drives in the enclosure and
tried to see if I could determine what was happening. As it turned out, the
secondary drive was loosing it's settings (or so I'm led to believe). Since
it was an older 80 GB drive I just trashed it and installed a newer drive
and have had no problems since. BTW, after installing it in the external
enclosure, I was able to get it functioning again as the secondary drive
long enough to copy to the new drive which was then in the external
enclosure. Don't normally recommend doing massive copies over USB 2.0, but
this time it was necessary.

Don't know if this will help or not since you're running SATA, but if you
have a second connector you might try swapping around and see if that works.

Alan 

-----Original Message-----
From: list-bounces at tsgserver.com [mailto:list-bounces at tsgserver.com] On
Behalf Of Don Penlington
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 2:28 AM
To: Tech Support Guy Mailing List
Subject: TSGL: Hard drive not in good spirits

XP SP2.

About 2 months ago I added a new Samsung 250Gb hard drive (H). Up till now,
everything has been fine. It was immediately auto-detected by the BIOS and
the installation all went without a hitch.

Suddenly, yesterday for no apparent reason, when I rebooted, the new drive
was no longer recognised by the BIOS (Award).

It did not appear in Device Manager and was nowhere to be seen. As if it's
been spirited right away---and, no, it hasn't fallen out of the case.

The primary drive is SATA1, the new drive is SATA2.

Checked all cables, all tight and nothing loose. No strange noises (I have
the sides off). The drive seems to be spinning and is running cool.

I rebooted and went into BIOS, changed Hard drive auto-detect to manual and
back again to auto. Then rebooted and H appeared again as normal.

Rebooted once more, and again---no H!!!.

Same procedure, changing BIOS from Hard Drive auto-detect to manual and back
again spirited H back once more.

After several more reboots, no regular pattern is emerging---sometimes H is
present and working, sometimes not.

I imaged C-drive back (Acronis True Image restore) a couple of months, but
that had no effect on this behaviour.

What could account for this intermittent problem?  Is it possible that my
shiny new H has some intermittent failure? I'm sure if I send it back to
Samsung under warranty, they'll say it's fine.

When it's present, it seems to be running OK. I use it for data only.

Maybe I need to indulge myself in some spirited behaviour. Any other
suggestions, short of suicide?

Do BIOS'es ever wear out? The computer is only 2 years old.

Don Penlington



 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html


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