Hi all, (apologies for wall of text in advance)
I'm having a nightmare with this problem, and after two nights on the trot fiddling and trying to diagnose i've come to a stand still.
I have 3 hard SATA drives:
1x 500gb = Vista Drive Main Hard Drive (Has the boot sector thing on it)
1x 500gb = Data Drive
1x 1000gb = Windows 7 Drive
All of which were working fine (2x500gb for 4/5 years and the new 1000gb for a good year) until i come back off holiday to find my 500gb Data Drive to be missing from My Computer when i first switched my computer on and booted to windows 7. I checked Disk Management, it was still there it just said "Missing". My first thought was maybe a cable had come loose, so I checked that. All seemed fine.
Rebooted and checked the BIOS to find all drives listed fine in the BIOS so i returned to windows 7 to see it still stated as missing from Disk Management. I checked Device manager, and sure enough all my drives are listed there as attached.
3rd Reboot and strangely my 500gb Data drive appeared, but instead my 500gb vista drive then doesnt appear (Very strange). Looked in disk management and sure enough the same thing had happened to that disk, but in the process the other one started working again.
Well, i though maybe it was a dodgy motherboard/SATA cables at this point so I had a play with what drive was plugged into what port tested a couple of different combinations all returning the same results (my vista drive was missing when booting into windows 7, the 500gb data drive was still there). After another play with connecting the drives to different SATA ports i log into windows 7 to find that BOTH the 500gb Vista Drive and the 500gb Data Drive have disappeared (ehhhh??).
Well I when to bed thinking that i could fix it this evening after work. Well, it's still not fixed and the current state is that the 2x 500gb drives (Vista and Data) are still not being picked up when booting to windows 7.
Just for a test, I attempted booting to Windows Vista (on the 500gb Vista Drive), low and behold, I manage to boot to vista and ONLY see the 500gb Vista drive (whaaat?).
So i've had combinations of seeing all the different drives still alive with data on them at different points and in different operating systems. But i now seem to get consistant results in Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
When booting to Windows 7 I only see the Windows 7 drive; In Disk management the Vista drive is labelled as Invalid and the Data drive is labelled as Foreign. All drives are listed as being connected under device manager.
When booting to Windows Vista I only see the Windows Vista drive. Windows 7 drive is labelled as Foreign and the Data drive is labelled as Invalid. All drives are listed as being connected under device manager.
I have also tried different power leads to the drives and a different port on the modular power supply to each drive - no difference. I can also confirm that every individual SATA port on my motherboard works (i tested it with my Windows 7 drive).
Anyone have a clue what on earth is happening? I'm absolutely stumped and dont know what the cause is! I would be happy if i could just pinpoint the cause.
Thanks a lot for any help!
Matt
I'm having a nightmare with this problem, and after two nights on the trot fiddling and trying to diagnose i've come to a stand still.
I have 3 hard SATA drives:
1x 500gb = Vista Drive Main Hard Drive (Has the boot sector thing on it)
1x 500gb = Data Drive
1x 1000gb = Windows 7 Drive
All of which were working fine (2x500gb for 4/5 years and the new 1000gb for a good year) until i come back off holiday to find my 500gb Data Drive to be missing from My Computer when i first switched my computer on and booted to windows 7. I checked Disk Management, it was still there it just said "Missing". My first thought was maybe a cable had come loose, so I checked that. All seemed fine.
Rebooted and checked the BIOS to find all drives listed fine in the BIOS so i returned to windows 7 to see it still stated as missing from Disk Management. I checked Device manager, and sure enough all my drives are listed there as attached.
3rd Reboot and strangely my 500gb Data drive appeared, but instead my 500gb vista drive then doesnt appear (Very strange). Looked in disk management and sure enough the same thing had happened to that disk, but in the process the other one started working again.
Well, i though maybe it was a dodgy motherboard/SATA cables at this point so I had a play with what drive was plugged into what port tested a couple of different combinations all returning the same results (my vista drive was missing when booting into windows 7, the 500gb data drive was still there). After another play with connecting the drives to different SATA ports i log into windows 7 to find that BOTH the 500gb Vista Drive and the 500gb Data Drive have disappeared (ehhhh??).
Well I when to bed thinking that i could fix it this evening after work. Well, it's still not fixed and the current state is that the 2x 500gb drives (Vista and Data) are still not being picked up when booting to windows 7.
Just for a test, I attempted booting to Windows Vista (on the 500gb Vista Drive), low and behold, I manage to boot to vista and ONLY see the 500gb Vista drive (whaaat?).
So i've had combinations of seeing all the different drives still alive with data on them at different points and in different operating systems. But i now seem to get consistant results in Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
When booting to Windows 7 I only see the Windows 7 drive; In Disk management the Vista drive is labelled as Invalid and the Data drive is labelled as Foreign. All drives are listed as being connected under device manager.
When booting to Windows Vista I only see the Windows Vista drive. Windows 7 drive is labelled as Foreign and the Data drive is labelled as Invalid. All drives are listed as being connected under device manager.
I have also tried different power leads to the drives and a different port on the modular power supply to each drive - no difference. I can also confirm that every individual SATA port on my motherboard works (i tested it with my Windows 7 drive).
Anyone have a clue what on earth is happening? I'm absolutely stumped and dont know what the cause is! I would be happy if i could just pinpoint the cause.
Thanks a lot for any help!
Matt
