HDD disappearing

[Friss]

Hi Overclockers

I've recently put a pair of WD green 2TB drives into my (fairly newly built) PC, and Windows (7 home 64bit) forgets the drive letters on every boot, occasional while the PC is on. Further, I have Norton Ghost 15 (came with my Samsung SSD) which never recognises them at all. No over volumes (primary on the SSD, and another on a RAID0) are never lost. The drives still appear in disk management

Ran a complete test with WD lifeguard diagnostics and the first passed, running the second now (but since the problem occurs with both I doubt this will find anything). Drives were previously (briefly) in a NAS until I got my reds, so I'm doing another complete format to both in case this left something behind...

Hardware wise:
MSI Z77a-GD65 board, latest drivers
NZXT Hale90 750W PSU.

I have tried them with SATA different cables on both the main intel controller (RAID mode) and second ASMedia controller (AHCI mode). If the complete format doesn't help, any other suggestions? Reinstall Windows ?

Thanks in advance

 

[unleashed]

Have you tried doing a diskpart clean before reformatting?

 

[Friss]

Thanks unleashed, I didn't think (/know) to do that. Just finished a full clean on both, initialised the drives, now Ghost recognises them which should mean it's all good now (since Ghost is unable to detect/backup any discs with bard partitions). Will reboot later and put them back on the Intel controller.

 

[unleashed]

Thanks unleashed, I didn't think (/know) to do that. Just finished a full clean on both, initialised the drives, now Ghost recognises them which should mean it's all good now (since Ghost is unable to detect/backup any discs with bard partitions). Will reboot later and put them back on the Intel controller.

A diskpart clean basically returns a drive back to its ex works state....clean and uninitialised, good tool.

Hope all goes well for you hereon

 

[Friss]

Thanks, yes it all seems to be good now. Took a bit more mucking around to put them in RAID1 with Intel RST. They needed to be initialised in windows before creating the array, which for some reason the IRST GUI just couldn't tell me (well, it's probably written somewhere).

 

[unleashed]

Thanks, yes it all seems to be good now. Took a bit more mucking around to put them in RAID1 with Intel RST. They needed to be initialised in windows before creating the array, which for some reason the IRST GUI just couldn't tell me (well, it's probably written somewhere).

Yeah, it took me awhile to get comfortable with RST but it's very good once everything is setup.

My standard routine with new drive set-ups (either brand spanker's or used drives) is a diskpart clean then initialise in windows disk management environment.

Great know you have it all sorted