Intermittent HDD Detection problem in BIOS / W11

Associate
Joined
28 Aug 2013
Posts
21
Hi All,

I've been getting this issue when on some occasions when I boot into W11, either one or both of my two Toshiba 4TB HDD drives (3726 GB actual size in disk management) are not showing in explorer.
Sometimes when I restart the PC then on next boot they will show up, and other times I may have to restart three or four times before they are detected.
They are both using GPT and are formatted as NTFS.
At one point I was using these drives without any issues but as this has been intermittent and happening for quite a long time, I can't say I know what I've changed or done to cause this behavior.

I've been trying to get to the bottom of this recently and have tried the following:
- Updated my chipset, GPU and Audio interface drivers
- Deleted the driver for both drives from device manager to let windows reinstall them on next boot.
- Changed SATA power and data cables for both drives for new ones and ensured connections are good.
- Tested both drives with SeaTools diagnostic, scanned them for bad sectors, ran chkdsk, all SMART feedback is good so I don't believe either of the drives are failing.

When I went into the BIOS a few days back, I could see both drives were detected there, but then when booting into windows the drives were missing.
Then earlier today when I went into the BIOS I saw only one of the drives was shown in BIOS but not the other. So it just seems very random sometimes they're there and sometimes not (both in BIOS and windows) and sometimes a restart will bring them back.

Another thing I noticed in the BIOS under the security tab where the drives are listed, you can go into the security settings for each drive where you can set passwords etc for them, the first line says "security enabled > No" but then there's another line which says "security frozen > Yes" (same on both drives). It says something about power cycling the drive to change this. I don't know if this "security frozen" could have something to do with it or not but I thought it may be worth mentioning.

I have secure boot enabled and fast boot disabled. Another thing I noticed was that when running the SeaTools diagnostic it showed all of my drives as being IDE, but in BIOS it's set to ACHI and device manager suggests its running in ACHI mode. Again not sure if these points are relevant or not.

I haven't updated my BIOS to the very latest for my MB yet, but I'm not convinced that this issue would be fixed by that because as previously mentioned there was a time not so long ago when this wasn't an issue on my current BIOS.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions on what else I can try / check to try to figure out what's causing this, and if it would help to provide more info on anything to assist then do let me know.

Many Thanks
X20
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2006
Posts
4,974
Location
Wiltshire
One thing I think you haven't tried is different SATA ports on the motherboard. Do update the BIOS if there is a newer one available just in case something has been silently fixed.

IDE stands for integrated Drive Electronics. Originally much of the drive 'intelligence' was on the mobo or the controller card but it then moved to the drives. These were PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) but universally known as IDE. When SATA (Serial ATA) came along people continued to use IDE instead of PATA although SATA drives are also IDE. So IDE tells you about the physical drive but AHCI just tells you how it's being used.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
7,841
Location
Scun'orp
Have a feel to see if the drive is physically spinning next time one disappears is all I can suggest as an extra check for power problems.
 
Back
Top Bottom