hard drive disappears then appears

[delaluz]

Hi,

I'm running w2000 on a Asus P4Pe. This rig has been running fine for 6 weeks. I installed Diskeeper defrag utility 9 days ago and defragged my c drive. I also ran it from a boot disk and de-fragged my boot sectors. This displayed a message saying that it ran successfully. I leave this PC on all the time. The next day I tried to use it by shaking the mouse to make the screen "wake up". The computer wouldn't respond at all. Finally I hit the reset button. The computer attempted to re-boot, but it didn't detect my hard drive. I hit the reset button several times and still it wouldn't detect my hard drive (I got a bios message saying there was no master on the primary ide connector.

I powered down the PC for a while turned it on and it found the hard drive and booted perfectly. I ran the Lifeguard utilities (from the Western Digital site) to check the drive and it said it was fine.

My PC froze two more times in the last week. When I hit the reset button it could't find the hard drive. If I power it off for 30 seconds it finds the hard drive and boots into w2000.

I would assume that this problem is related to de-fragmenting the boot sectors on my drive with the Diskeeper utility.

Any ideas how to fix this or further diagnose it? It's not caused by the IDE cable (it happened with 2 different ones). I don't think its the power connector (I took the drive out & put it back in and it happened again).

Any ideas?

 

[Dreamland]

The fact that this happened after your defragged it is probably just a coincidence - the boot sector's location is fixed and it was not disturbed.

There are often problems with Win 2K/XP and the motherboard's BIOS fighting over power management control. Does your BIOS assign APM control to the operating system or vice versa? Are both set to control it?

They're suppose to be aware of each other to some degree, but there's not much consistency. Try setting one to 'always on' and letting the other manage all power functions. 2K and XP seem to get cranky about the BIOS doing anything, so I would defer to the O/S first for troubleshooting (just an observation). Sometimes updated motherboard drivers and/or BIOS updates help - the operative word here being *sometimes*.

 

[delaluz]

I just set the W2K power management to "never".

I don't think it's a driver because it worked perfect for 2 months. Something either changed or is starting to break.

 

[TSSTechie]

Hi

I am probably wrong but it could be be the hard drive is on its way out so, if you haven't already, I'd do a backup ASAP just to be safe

 

[Dreamland]

Sorry - just more questions for now....

What WD model / capacity hard drive?

Was S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled or disabled? (Lifeguard / BIOS)

What file system(s) on what size partition(s)?

 

[delaluz]

Dreamland,

I'm running a WD 80 gig 7200 rpm with the 8 meg cahce

I didn't do anything to enable S.M.A.R.T.

I have 3 partitions on this drive:

1. a 7 gig system partition
2. a 5 gig partition for the swap file
3. the rest for data.

Please note that the first freeze occured when I only had 2 paritions: a 4 gig system and the rest for data. After the first freeze occured I:
1. created an image backup of my system partition
2. created an image backup of my data partition (with Ture Image) plus copied all the data files to another drive
3. deleted the data partition
4. enlarged the system partition from 4 to 7 gig with Boot-IT
5. created the swap file parition and created the data partition
6. restored the data image (with True Image).

A day after I did all this I experienced frezzes number 2 and 3.

I've since un-installed Diskeeper.

I've also studied the event log and the power usage log that my Belkin UPS maintains. The only thing I noticed is that the night the first freeze occured the Diskeeper program was defragging all of my drives. I think it may have hung during this process.

So, we'll see if it happensa again.

 

[Dreamland]

S.M.A.R.T. might be enabled by default, delaluz. You might actually have to disable it to see if it affects anything.

The next thing I would suspect is thermal stability of one of the two chips involved in moving data from the HDD. There are many other possible causes, but this problem is probably the easiest to check for.

The only thing special about Diskkeeper is that it obviously puts a lot of strain on the drive, specifically the large actuator controller chip on the drive logic board itself - any defrag program will do this, not just DiskKeeper. Other drive manufacturers have experienced thermal stability problems with their controller chips in the past, so you may want to check this chip on your drive to see if it gets especially hot and make provisions for adequate cooling.

That chip *shouldn't* require a heatsink or anything like that (although I've seen it done) but at least make sure it isn't sitting on top of or covered by another warm device. The southbridge chip on your motherboard also gets a workout during defrag or large file transfers. All motherboards are different, so you have to check your doc. to identify it.

Both of these chips are prone to static damage, so ensure you ground yourself and ground the tip of your finger immediately prior to feeling these chips. And you will only notice problems during large file transfers or intensive disk operations like a defrag. They usually don't have heat-related problems during 'normal' use.

A *very* rough rule is: if the chip is too hot to touch after five or ten minutes of intensive disk use, then you may want to consider additional local chip cooling. This whole issue is somewhat related to overall case cooling, but we're really talking about a local problem with two specific chips - it can happen despite adequate overall case ventilation. Don't run out and buy a set of noisy 80mm turbo-prop case fans if a cheap $1.25 heatsink or simply repositioning the drive or cables near these chips help.

DiskKeeper itself isn't the problem. Your system should be stable enough to defrag for extended periods. If you simply avoid using it, then the problem will occur less frequently but is still there. Unfortunately, it will probably only happen during large date transfers - like backups and restores. Best to pinpoint the problem now if possible, and DiskKeeper is a great way to stress the data path to investigate.

 

[billdago]

Just wondering if you resolved your WD 80 Gig disappearing drive. I had the same problem with a 120 JB and P4PE Board. Found a fix on the Western Digital site. Explained the symptons exactly. My intermittent problem had been driving me nuts for several months. The program is called wdnewcfg.exe. Good Luck