Hard Drive just vanished!!??: Anything I can do?

Draeger · 18 Oct 2006 at 22:27

I have 3 hard drives in my system, 1x40Gb with Windows on it, another 40Gb used as an "Archive" drive with music, vids etc and a 100Gb where all my games are installed.

This evening, the 100Gb drive just vanished from my PC.

It gets detected at the POST, but once windows boots up and the desktop appears, its not there. :eek:

All drives are Maxtor Diamondmax drives.

Is there anything I can do to see about getting it back and working again?.

It wasn't making any strange noises or anything, and was working fine up until about 2 hours ago when it went missing!!!.

squiffy · 18 Oct 2006 at 22:31

Are they seen under disc managment? Are the partitions active/healthy?

Maxtor

they're supposed to do that (lose data)

Draeger · 18 Oct 2006 at 22:38

squiffy said:
Are they seen under disc managment? Are the partitions active/healthy?

Will 'ave a look-see and check. :cool:

Draeger · 22 Oct 2006 at 16:27

Upon connecting power to the hard drive, its detected at the POST, Windows boots up ( takes a while though ) and when the desktop appears I get a pop up bubble on the taskbar telling me that new hardware has been detected......Maxtor hard drive etc.

After a while the pop up bubble vanishes and if I go into "My Computer", there's still no sign of the drive.

Looked with Disk Manager and its not showing there either.

If you reboot after that, the POST detects the drive once again, but this time its showing as a Maxtor 621YOOLO1010FG%*$DFGS&$^$%FGDG ( or something similar, just gobbledeygook !!! ). Then the at the POST screen, it says "Primary Slave drive failed".

If I disconnect the power from the drive after shutting down and then reboot, the PC is fine.

squiffy · 22 Oct 2006 at 16:55

Check cable, I've that before. Cable wasen't fully in but detected as something like yours ie "Pioneer 4789fsd98" Not quite pushed in fully. Try another cable too.

Draeger · 22 Oct 2006 at 17:06

Thanks, will try that and see how it goes.

Draeger · 23 Oct 2006 at 14:57

Thanks squiffy!!!

That was exactly what the problem was. The IDE cable wan't sitting properly, in fact I had slightly bent one of the pins on the rear of the hard drive for my cackhandedness!!.

All is well now, got my 100Gb drive back and popped out today and bought a USB hard drive external enclosure, so I've removed one of the 40Gb drives and I'm using it in the enclosure for archiving files now.

Excellent!!!.

Thanks again.