Hard drive wont show up

[Hayamaneko]

Last night, I expirenced a serious problem with my computer where it would suddenly not turn on becuase the boot file was not found. After awile, my system would tell me that the NTLDR file was missing. I eventually decided on reinstalling windows, but once the installation was complete I found that only one of my hard drive showed up on the device manager. I tried unplugging/plugging it in while the computer was on so that it could be detected, but nothing happen. Hardware wizard did nothing either. Could my drive possible be dead?

[SeijiSensei]

Try booting and hitting whatever key is required to take you into Setup. You should see an entry for hard drives. If the missing drive doesn't appear in the list, you have a couple of choices. First, make sure that the detection is set to "auto" or something like that so the computer will look at the drive. If the entry for that drive is set to "off," reset it to auto and see if that helps. Choose the appropriate key to save the setup information and reboot.

If the computer fails to detect the drive no matter what you try, it's probably dead. Windows can't see a drive that the computer's BIOS cannot detect.

[Hayamaneko]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

First, make sure that the detection is set to "auto" or something like that so the computer will look at the drive. If the entry for that drive is set to "off," reset it to auto and see if that helps. Choose the appropriate key to save the setup information and reboot.

They were set to auto, but I still cannot see the drive. Is thier any other way of detecting it?

[Jinto]

Maybe it got no drive letter assigned in Windows. And you have to do this manually. In control panel -> administrative tools -> computer settings (or something like this) -> drives you will find a list of all drives Windows does find. You can also see, if/what driver letters are assigned to them. If there is one drive having no drive letter assigned, choose one manually.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Hayamaneko

They were set to auto, but I still cannot see the drive. Is thier any other way of detecting it?

Did you see an entry for the drive as well? Usually the BIOS lists the drive's identification string which includes its manufacturer and size. You might have to "drill down" a level or two in the BIOS menus.

[demonix]

You could go into disk management and see if the missing drive is there by right-clicking in my computer (this can be done either from the icon on your desktop if you have one on there or through the one in the start menu) select manage and then select the disk management option and you should then see all the drives that are connected to your computer if they are active or not and if you see your missing drive then you'll have to do one of there two things (or you may have to do both).

Assign the drive a letter like jinto lin has suggested or (and I can guess that this will be the correct course of action) you might have to initialize the drive (since you did say that you did reinstall your OS)

[Hayamaneko]

Originally Posted by demonix

You could go into disk management and see if the missing drive is there by right-clicking in my computer (this can be done either from the icon on your desktop if you have one on there or through the one in the start menu) select manage and then select the disk management option and you should then see all the drives that are connected to your computer if they are active or not and if you see your missing drive then you'll have to do one of there two things (or you may have to do both).

Assign the drive a letter like jinto lin has suggested or (and I can guess that this will be the correct course of action) you might have to initialize the drive (since you did say that you did reinstall your OS)

Ive tried going into computer Management > Storage>Disk Management to see if their where any other drive but found only my older drive. I also tried connecting this supposedly dead hard drive into another computer, but that computer did not detect it either. I also checked the BIOS menu when doing this and found that their was apparently no drive installed where the defective drive was connected. Disconnecting all other hard drives and turning on the computer also didn't work, as the computer gave me a "no hard drives detected" message.

[Ledgem]

It sounds like the drive is dead. If it isn't a matter of mechanical failure (the drive's motors/reader heads), then the drive's onboard controller was probably ruined, which would explain why it isn't showing up on any computer. How old is the drive, and was it making any weird sounds shortly before your problems occurred? Or, were there any power surges or any other events like that that occurred in that time frame?

[Hayamaneko]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

How old is the drive, and was it making any weird sounds shortly before your problems occurred? Or, were there any power surges or any other events like that that occurred in that time frame?

The drive was only a few months old (I purchased it in November from Newegg). I didn't notice anything wrong with it up to that point, though a few days ago I found that my IP address was missing and I had to reset my router.

[Ledgem]

Statistics show that the highest rate of failures in hard drive occur when the drives are 0-6 months old, and 5+ years old. You possibly got unlucky. The good news is that your drive should still be under warranty. I don't know that you can get the data on it back, but you should be able to get a new drive.

[Potatochobit]

i think you should stop building computers w. anyway, you are running xp on both computers, right? the power plug was in the right way, right? if so and both computers did not recognize the hard drive then it sounds like it was fried when your computer failed or was the cause of the failure. when that happened, you did not hear any pops or clicking did you? a broken hard drive can cause your computer not to start up, even if its not the master. I just had to replace my secondary drive. send it back and get a new one if you still have the reciept. but if you got it from new egg you MUST first call them and get a return number. be sure to right click your desktop - properties - screen saver - power, and choose a time for your hard drives also. you also might want to partition your new drive if its not going to be just video storage.

[toru310]

Hi, I might be next in line because my slave hard drive is 3 month old....and the most scariest part when I got my pc(with a crapy cracked os, no upgrades, crapy ram, no video card) I have no Idea what a hard drive is...and It crashed so many times....and one time I left my pc update windows but I left it in switch user mode so....when the update was done it automatically installed the updates and crashed..and the fire wall was gone...(I mean not even system restore can fix it.) and when It says reboot windows installed...and I thought yeah fix problem and then...It rebooted and It can't anymore boot..when it boot it crash again and again and again...that was the time when I was so noob at pc even now..hehe...sorry for the off topic..

Anyhow I can really relate to this person problem because I think I will be next in line with this incoming problem..(Hope not)..

I don't do stressy things I just let Bitcomet download funsubs maybe games or watch fansub.....And I limit my activities.....

So at what chance you think my hard drive fail...hehe...so far updated my windows and so far no crashes detected...

Also when I looked at the Disk management and both my hard drives are healthy is it a good sign???

Finally what's much better internal hdd or external hdd?(In terms of durability.)

One more thing if you unplug a external hdd and put it somewhere safe and left it their and plug it in again for about 1month will something happen to the drive.? cause I was thinking backing up files with an external hdd and puting it in storage for back up...

Aha! how about putting all my files in an Ipod video 80gb but to expensive..hehe

[Jinto]

@Migufuchi Fusutsu,

You need not worry about your harddrive yet. The video you send me indicated problems with your RAM. Memtest found some areas in the memory that caused bitflips. So unless you fixed this problem, you can blame the RAM for the instabilities.

[Xellos-_^]

One thing i am doing to lessen the chance of drive failure is to make most of my drives external. You only need to turn on the one you need to use so less wear and tear on the drives you are not using, also reduce heat damage since the drives are now not all in place.

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Migufuchi Fusutsu

Hi, I might be next in line because my slave hard drive is 3 month old....and the most scariest part when I got my pc(with a crapy cracked os, no upgrades, crapy ram, no video card) I have no Idea what a hard drive is...and It crashed so many times....and one time I left my pc update windows but I left it in switch user mode so....when the update was done it automatically installed the updates and crashed..and the fire wall was gone...(I mean not even system restore can fix it.) and when It says reboot windows installed...and I thought yeah fix problem and then...It rebooted and It can't anymore boot..when it boot it crash again and again and again...that was the time when I was so noob at pc even now..hehe...sorry for the off topic..

Go with what Jinto Lin said. While the issues could be caused by a faulty HD, it sounds more like a RAM problem.

If you want to find out your drive manufacturer, you have two ways you could go about it. The first is to physically look at the drive: there should be a manufacturer's label, stating the drive model, capacity, serial number, etc. Usually the company name is listed on there as well, but even if it's not, you can tell which company made it by the model number.

The other way is through Windows. Go to the Control Panel, System, Devices, Device Manager. Expand your Disk Drives. You should see the raw model numbers. I have five drives, one is a Maxtor, one is a Seagate, and three are Western Digitals. For reference, the Maxtor says "Maxtor" in it (very old drive, they may not do that anymore); the Seagate identifies itself with "ST###########" and the Western Digitals are all prefaced with WDC (for Western Digital Caviar, I presume - Caviar being their HD line that I bought). Other companies that exist include Samsung and Hitachi, and I don't know what those would look like. You can Google for it or, if you're lost, post what you have here, and I'm sure someone can match it up.

Anyhow I can really relate to this person problem because I think I will be next in line with this incoming problem..(Hope not)..

If you do that, you'll give yourself false positives. Your drive is only three months old, it should be fine. If you hear anything weird, then you can start worrying. And trust me, you'll know when it's something weird - unless you're massively silencing your drive or you have a very noisy case, the sound that the drive makes will stand out.

So at what chance you think my hard drive fail...hehe...so far updated my windows and so far no crashes detected...

Low chance. If you want a number, 15%.

Also when I looked at the Disk management and both my hard drives are healthy is it a good sign???

Yes, and it doesn't mean anything. The disk manager doesn't tell you the S.M.A.R.T. attributes, which is what monitors your drive health via on-board sensors to the drive. And even then, SMART is prone to making mistakes - sometimes it gives you a million false positives, and statistically it can't predict drive failure something like 50% of the time.

Finally what's much better internal hdd or external hdd?(In terms of durability.)

That completely depends on how you set them up. If you have a very hot, stuffy case and your drives aren't secured very well, you may want to consider an external drive. On the other hand, if you're going to be stacking external drives, you'll fry them. At my workplace we had some external LaCie drives, 500 GB each. They kept being placed right up against each other. They were used for video capture, and they ran very hot. One of them failed on us. Maybe it was an old drive. However, there's a misconception about drives and heat that I'll clear up with the last post.

One more thing if you unplug a external hdd and put it somewhere safe and left it their and plug it in again for about 1month will something happen to the drive.? cause I was thinking backing up files with an external hdd and puting it in storage for back up...

Theoretically, no. If it's kept in a humid area, though, then you're asking for trouble. It's not really too different than storing DVDs, I think, except that the drive has a motor and such. You don't need to be paranoid about it, but do be smart about it.

Aha! how about putting all my files in an Ipod video 80gb but to expensive..hehe

Terrible idea. You wouldn't be able to run any drive diagnostics in the event of a problem, and the iPod is relatively finicky about acting as a storage drive. Perhaps the newer iPods are better about it, but my ancient 3rd Gen iPod was miserable.

Originally Posted by Xellos-_^

One thing i am doing to lessen the chance of drive failure is to make most of my drives external. You only need to turn on the one you need to use so less wear and tear on the drives you are not using, also reduce heat damage since the drives are now not all in place.

External drives can run hotter than internal drives, simply because they're in an enclosure (less ventilation) and you probably don't have a fan running on them. That aside, heat itself isn't a huge issue. Google had a research paper about hard drive statistics, and one of the factors mentioned was that hard drive temperature didn't impact drive failure rates - the range of temperatures that a drive was exposed to did, with drives going through greater fluctuations in temperature having an earlier fail rate than drives that were held relatively constant. It's just something to keep in mind. Your drive does have a temperature operating range, and you don't want to step outside of that range, but if you're within the range then it shouldn't matter what your temperature is so long as the drive doesn't go through any huge changes.

If turning drives on and off is your concern, it's relatively valid. However, note that you can have your drives spin down after a certain period of inactivity from Windows itself. If the drive spins down, even though it's still technically "on," for all intents and purposes it is mechanically off. It has to spin up again for you to access it. It's not a recommended course of action if you're accessing your drives frequently, but if you do have long periods of inactivity, it may be worth it.

Personally, I just wish that I could set certain drives to spin down after X idle time, and have other drives always stay up (as opposed to having a system-wide setting)... if anyone knows how to do this, please let me know. I've tried some googling for it, but it doesn't seem like it's possible.

Very nice signature, by the way.

[toru310]

@Ledgem yeah I can see the ST########## I was thinking of replacing the ram that is free with the computer because I think the ram is abnormal 224mb since they came form different manufactures I think they deny each other.. thanks for the info you are so pro..

As expected from Jinto Lin you know every answer in my problem was it because of the mass messages that I send computer related ehehe..Oh yeah...thanks!

[Jinto]

Since I don't want to hijack this thread, my answer is in http://forums.animesuki.com/showthre...t=44175&page=4

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Migufuchi Fusutsu

I think the ram is abnormal 224mb since they came form different manufactures I think they deny each other.. thanks for the info you are so pro.

224 is the right number if you have 256 MB of memory and have a video card or onboard video that shares the memory. Low-end shared-ram video adapters usually grab 32 MB of your memory, leaving you with 224 for the operating system and programs.

However it sounds from Jinto's posting that the memory itself is flaky. Given how cheap memory is these days, it's probably worth pulling it and replacing it with a couple of 256 MB or 512 MB chips. More memory almost always improves overall performance, especially if you multitask several memory-hungry programs like browsers, office applications, Azureus, etc.

[demonix]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

The other way is through Windows. Go to the Control Panel, System, Devices, Device Manager. Expand your Disk Drives. You should see the raw model numbers. I have five drives, one is a Maxtor, one is a Seagate, and three are Western Digitals. For reference, the Maxtor says "Maxtor" in it (very old drive, they may not do that anymore); the Seagate identifies itself with "ST###########" and the Western Digitals are all prefaced with WDC (for Western Digital Caviar, I presume - Caviar being their HD line that I bought). Other companies that exist include Samsung and Hitachi, and I don't know what those would look like. You can Google for it or, if you're lost, post what you have here, and I'm sure someone can match it up.

I just looked through all the hard drives I have installed on my computer and apart from one starting ST (which is my slave seagate barracuda drive that I installed a few months ago) I have one that starts HDS which has now made me cringe 'cause if I'm right on this it means that my main hard drive is an Hitachi deathstar (which is going to be gone in a few months since I'm in the process of obtaining parts for a major rebuild of my computer)