Please help I have Magic Drives

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:45

I got a weird problem that is making my brain hurt thinking about it.

I have 13 HDD's connected right now, one of them is a USB and the rest are SATA.

They are all connected to three HDD controllers. 4-5 are connected to the motherboard, two are connected to one PCI card (2x) and the rest are connected to the other PCI card (x8). I'm using Windows 7, latest updates and all that.

I did have 15 HDD's (two of them IDE to SATA) connected about 20 minutes ago, but I disconnected them and removed them. I then rebooted the once to install my updates.

My Computer is showing 16 HDD's. I don't have partitions.

My computer is open case and am looking at it right now, I can only count 13.

I can still access all the drives and play files in them.

What is going on. :eek:

hughtrimble · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:46

Partition?

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:49

hughtrimble said:
Partition?

Don't have any.

UKDTweak · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:51

Open Disk Management, how many drives are listed, do you have any card readers?

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:53

UKDTweak said:
Open Disk Management, how many drives are listed, do you have any card readers?

It's showing 16.

I have no card readers.

Could the HDD cards have some uber cache system that is ghosting the HDD's?

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 13:54

Double post.

UKDTweak · 12 Jun 2014 at 14:11

Do you have any usb devices plugged in such as a printer that has a card reader built in?
Does disk management show 16 individual drives, each with a letter assigned, one per line??
Can you goto My computer and access each of the drive letters and do they show different files ??

Open Device Manager... how many drives does it list??

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 14:56

UKDTweak said:
Do you have any usb devices plugged in such as a printer that has a card reader built in?
Does disk management show 16 individual drives, each with a letter assigned, one per line??
Can you goto My computer and access each of the drive letters and do they show different files ??

Open Device Manager... how many drives does it list??

No printer connected, no monitors connected by USB, no other equipment with any sort of card reader.

Disk Management shows 16 individual drives with letters and names assigned per line. No partitions.

I can access each drive, read the files and folders within and create new media inside them.

wonko · 12 Jun 2014 at 16:08

And are there are no RAID arrays involved that could be showing 1 physical drive as 2 or more logical drives in disk management? Or drivepool, RAM disks or similar?

Could you match up the disks showing in disk management with the physical disks (e.g. comparing capacities) to work out which are the "ghost" ones and investigate from there?

Cuchulain · 12 Jun 2014 at 16:10

15 drives? Good lord, that's a lot of Hentai!

Akagi · 12 Jun 2014 at 16:14

I can't wait for the conclusion of this thread... I have a feeling it will be a good one...

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 17:01

wonko said:
And are there are no RAID arrays involved that could be showing 1 physical drive as 2 or more logical drives in disk management? Or drivepool, RAM disks or similar?

Could you match up the disks showing in disk management with the physical disks (e.g. comparing capacities) to work out which are the "ghost" ones and investigate from there?

No RAID or anything. My drives are all just connected to two HDD controllers and the motherboard. No partitions and each drive is treated normally, no RAID setup.

I can match each drive in My Computer to the drives in the PC, apart from the drives I have removed which are the IDE drives.

I will take some photos later and upload showing everything.

wonko · 12 Jun 2014 at 17:15

So 2 or the 3 are the unplugged IDE drives, what's the third?
What sort of converter are you using to connect the IDE drives to SATA ports, and is it still attached?

IronWarrior · 12 Jun 2014 at 18:26

wonko said:
So 2 or the 3 are the unplugged IDE drives, what's the third?
What sort of converter are you using to connect the IDE drives to SATA ports, and is it still attached?

The third, I have no idea, am confused about that too.

The converter is just one of the simple little card things you find on eBay that connects to the back of the IDE drive which has a SATA and 3/4pin molex power connection.

That's also unplugged.

Maybe I reboot again and see what happens.

hughtrimble · 13 Jun 2014 at 01:00

Get someone else to count them! This is sounding mighty strange.

eikomagami · 13 Jun 2014 at 02:50

unplug everything except the boot drive then add them back one at a time and see when extra drives appear?.

UKDTweak · 13 Jun 2014 at 07:44

do you have any virtual disks mounted?

IronWarrior · 13 Jun 2014 at 15:51

Here are the photos.

The USB drive is the one with the blue light. The SDD is the little black thing at the bottom of the HDD cage. The two HotSwaps have two HDD's inside. the DVD drive is not connected.

The Raid Card is an 3Ware 9500S-8, 8-Port SATA RAID while the smaller one is a Lycom PE-115 SATA.

I have rebooted 5 times so far and did two full shutdowns to check wires.

So am I going crazy or what?

IronWarrior · 13 Jun 2014 at 16:04

Some of my friends are telling me that HDD controllers do have some sort of cache system but that shouldn't explain why detached drives should still be showing up.

The cache system would explain why when I download to drives Q, T or V I would lose data again after a while.

wonko · 13 Jun 2014 at 16:35

Device manager is showing 11 disks attached to your 8-port RAID card, which would be quite an achievement... I'd suspect it's something to do with your raid card and drivers.

Also, explorer and disk mgmt is showing (formatted) capacities of Q, T & V as 327GB (GiB) which seems an unlikely value - it would mean an advertised disk capacity around 350GB - did anyone make them that size?