My secondary internal drive keeps disapearing from my computer in vista 64. It will reappear several hours later and autoplay runs. It then vanishes again in another hour or so. When its there it works fine. I am worried though as I have a secondary boot of xp on there and I'm worried I won't be able to boot vista off the drive if I restart as I had to use vista boot pro and the secondary drive stores the boot agent I think (can't be sure). Ideas?
D drive disapearing
- Thread starter greedy123
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I did recently swap my sata controller to AHCI from IDE which is round the time it started. Might that have caused something like this? The secondary drive (xp) is a Seagate 120GB drive (2-3 years old) and the primary (vista) is a seagate 320 GB drive (same age).
Could try swapping back, was there a reason you swapped it back?
ACHI is just better than IDE, with no downsides other than compatibility issues (yes with XP), but even those are avoided if you install XP with ACHI enabled I thought?
Unless you do need drivers to install XP on ACHI, in which case fair enough.
If you can't switch the Seagate back to ACHI, you could try switching your other drive to IDE. You'll need to change a registry setting before you do I think though, and I can't remember what.
ACHI is just better than IDE, with no downsides other than compatibility issues (yes with XP), but even those are avoided if you install XP with ACHI enabled I thought?
Unless you do need drivers to install XP on ACHI, in which case fair enough.
If you can't switch the Seagate back to ACHI, you could try switching your other drive to IDE. You'll need to change a registry setting before you do I think though, and I can't remember what.
Ah I thought for some reason you'd just swapped the drive that's playing up to IDE (therefore presuming it was on a different controller).
In that case, try it in a different pc and see if it does the same, if you have access to one. Or try swapping SATA cables/ports.
In that case, try it in a different pc and see if it does the same, if you have access to one. Or try swapping SATA cables/ports.
I unplugged one of my 3 external usb drives, after a few minutes the D drive reappeared. I left the usb drive off and since then the D drive has remained... is there a limit to how many drives vista can have connected at once?
Not that I'm aware of. If you swap round your externals so the one you unplugged is in a different port, unplug a different one, and the third you plug into the usb port you unplugged from to make it work.. if it still works, you know it's not the hard drive or the usb port. Then try plugging the external back in and if that breaks it, I guess it's the number of devices 
Although you could try spreading your devices out through different USB controllers if it turns out to be the number of devices
Although you could try spreading your devices out through different USB controllers if it turns out to be the number of devices
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Disable it and see if anything appears in its place; there may be a drive assignment conflict.
Thanks for suggestions.
Ok while my computer was on over night, I came to it this morning and the drive reconnected 5 times. i had 5 different scan for errors windows for the drive up. That usb drive has been unplugged over a day now so it is clearly not that. Must be a problem with the connectors or hd?
I'm running a virus scan on the drive while it's there. I opened disk management and noticed the drive has 9MB unallocated which none of my other drives do. Could that mean something?
Ok while my computer was on over night, I came to it this morning and the drive reconnected 5 times. i had 5 different scan for errors windows for the drive up. That usb drive has been unplugged over a day now so it is clearly not that. Must be a problem with the connectors or hd?
I'm running a virus scan on the drive while it's there. I opened disk management and noticed the drive has 9MB unallocated which none of my other drives do. Could that mean something?
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Well my computer just totally turned itself off for no reason a few minutes ago. Just totally cut off without warning and turned itself back on. I've set the sata controller back to IDE, let's see if that stops the problems.
Well its been 7 hours since i changed back to IDE and no problems. The D drive hasn't vanished once and the computer hasn't restarted itself. Gonna leave it on over night to confirm. This is the longest the drive has stayed connected since the problem began so I think I've fixed it. Any reason why AHCI would cause my drives to act so strangely? I made the registry change in vista before altering the BIOS.