Weird Hard Drive Problem

Flying Anorak · 21 Jan 2010 at 01:40

Hi,

This has got me beat - any ideas?

A new system build - 1 x Crucial M225 as my Win 7 Boot Drive and 3 x Samsung F3 drives. All showed up fine, Win 7 installed and partitioned etc. Tonight I oc'd the system and installed True Image to back up my SSD and then I noticed that one of my F3's had disappeared! Went into Disk Management and it was showing as unallocated space. I can't format it because it's not initialised and when I try and initialise it tells me that either the media is write protected or I get a 'Data Error CRC' message!

So, is it a Win 7 error or a hardware failure on one of my new F3's?

What do you reckon - reinstall Win 7 and see if this cures it or do you think the drive is kaput? I've checked the BIOS (Asus P6TD Deluxe) and write protection is not enabled.

Would changing from IDE to AHCI mode fix it??

Help...!!!!

Thanks,

DoctorPolski · 21 Jan 2010 at 08:50

Changing to AHCI probably wouldn't help and generally just causes headaches when Windows restarts.

Have you tried re-seating all the drive cables? Could it be a power issue, is the drive spinning up?

Have you tried a diagnostic of the drive with the Samsung Tool: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html ?

Flying Anorak · 21 Jan 2010 at 09:26

Thanks, will try the diagnostic tool tonight. I've re-seated all the cables and I have a top spec (1.2Kw!) power supply so don't think it's that. The drive is visible in the bios and Windows Drive Management Console, but it shows it as a non formatted not initialized drive which is weird as it was formatted and partitioned last weekend.

After booting I can go into the console and write clicking on the drive gives me one chance to initialize the drive and set the MBR etc. If I say yes, it tries but then I get an error which either says 'The Media is Write Protected' (how, I've not set it to be and can't find any way of changing this?) or I get a CRC error. AFAIK the drive seems to be powering and spinning up ok which makes me think either Win (64 bit) has got confused or it's a physical hardware failure. What could cause a formatted and partitioned hard drive to disappear from Windows and then show as a new unlocated drive?

Any ideas welcome, never had thiis happen before!

Thanks.

DoctorPolski · 21 Jan 2010 at 12:54

It does kind of point to to a hardware failure, I can't think of another reason. I'm sure someone else will chip in if they think of something.