SATA Drives Disappearing

[Sound Drifter]

I have come across a strange happening with my new system. Sometimes after W7 64 bit starts, one of my sata drives turns to an exclamation in windows explorer, vanishes completely then comes back.

Any ideas?

MOBO UD3r v2
Win 7 home premium 64 bit.

[MattiasNYC]

All of them? Sounds like a controller problem. Obviously make sure you're backed up properly and then search the web for any known problems with that Mobo / controller. That's where I'd start.

[Sound Drifter]

That is what I have read on a few windows forums. I am in the middle of a backup as I type this. Been so for the past 2 days as I keep moving things over in the most organized way possible.

It is really strange.. It disappears then comes back just when windows finishes loading. Then all is fine, or so it seems. Weird.

[Sound Drifter]

Ok, this seems to happen with older Seagate 7200.10 drives. Watching the device manager, it comes up as "Disc Drive" it disappears and returns with a model number after that. Then all seems working.

[MattiasNYC]

Strange. I'd be very careful about this issue.

Off the top of my head I'd try shutting down completely, unplugging power for at least 5 min, replug and reboot.

Then there are likely ways for you to reset batteries or memory or whatever the heck it is on your MOBO. Might be a hard reset switch that you need to access inside the case. That helps sometimes.

Last option if it's a controller issue I think would be to uninstall/reinstall the driver for the controller. Pain in the ass in my opinion.

Unless of course this is a drive issue in which case I'd just swap the drives for newer ones and see if the problem persists.

good luck.

[Sound Drifter]

Oh, I am careful. I think the best thing to do, since it seems to be local to this particular drive is to retire it all together and throw it out. I will not speak of data loss! I have at least 3 backups of everything :)

Keeping a real close eye on this. I cant seem to pinpoint anything via internet searches other than Windows un-mounting the drive due to hibernation which I have set to always on, or whatever Windows 7 phrasing is for it.

Strange thing is, looking in the bios, the model comes up fine every time I check. In windows, more specific now after watching very closely, the model is in device manager, then changes to disc drive (drive then disappears in explorer), then reappears with the drive model again and reappears in explorer and windows pops up with a notification of scanning the drives files. Same auto-run dialogue you would see if you had inserted a cd or usb stick.

[2407WFPHC]

I'd check the cables, too. It does seem OS/Driver related though.

[Daryl]

I've had an SSD drop out many times over the last few months. The drive has been replaced, the motherboard has been replaced. Still happens, usually right in the middle of a session. I've now dumped it (that's £500 I'll never see again) and gone back to a 7200 drive (with a sneaky partition). So far no drop-outs, but it's early days.

i assumed that it was the fault of the SSD, but I wonder if it is a W7 problem. Hmmmmmmmm...........

D

[2407WFPHC]

No SSD/W7 issues over here on 4 different systems. One runs in RAID mode, 2 run in AHCI mode, and one in IDE mode. All Intel Chipsets with Intel SSD's.

[dementedchord]

i had a similar issue... 2 drives seemed to get lost... took one out and it didnt find it... put second in alone and it found it... so first was the problem... sent to seagate lost data but copped a new drive from them... it was a st3500320as 7500rpm 500G 32mbuffer