HD Madness - Losing partitions & drives, Impossible capacity 1

[EmmBee19]

Within the last 10 days, I've experienced a lifetime's worth of hard drive problems!

Summary of Problems:
(1): Some hard drives show more storage than physical capacity.

(2): Some hard drives not seen at all on the same SATA port that other drives work fine on.

(3): Partitions disappear, are then restored, then disappear again.

(4): Similar problems now on two separate XP Pro/SP3 computers. Is it spreading?

Details:

(1): (a): A 1.5 TB WD drive shows nearly 2 TB already stored there.

(b): A 1.0 TB WD drive shows nearly 1.5 TB already stored there.

All affected disks are basic/simple; no RAID or advanced partition types. All partitions are NTFS, none are compressed. I used both XP's Disk Manager and Acronis Disk Director 11 to view the drives' used space and physical capacity (reported physical capacity much greater than actual hardware capacity). What the heck is going on?

(2): Starting about a week ago, some hard drives were seen on the system, but were falsely reported to be completely unallocated. I was able to recover the partitions and data, but as of today, some of those drives aren't seen at all! (examined by Acronis Disk Director 11, XP Disk Management, XP Device Manager).

(3): I've seen 3 or 4 disks "lose" all partitions, but I was able to recover everything with Acronis Disk Director 11's Recovery tool. Later, the partitions disappeared again! It looks like I can recover them again, but what's the point?

(4): At first, I was only having problems on one of my computers. Now I'm having very similar problems on two XP Pro/SP3 systems. I ran Kaspersky 2010 KAV on the first computer, searching for root kits and all malware at absolute maximum settings, but it could find no infections.

Can some kind of malware cause these kinds of problem? If so, what tool should I run to get rid of it?

Aaargh! Please - Help!

 

[BadBigBen]

1. Download the Western Digital LifeGuard (the manufacturers tool) to diagnostic the drives...

alternatively, you can download the SeaTools from Seagate...

2. get replacement drives to recover the data to them and to replace those drives, go with another brand...

3. update chipset drivers and SATA drivers...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

After testing/verifying hard drive, could it be a motherboard problem???

 

[EmmBee19]

Thanks for your reply, BadBigBen!

I've downloaded and run the latest version of WD diags several times on both systems before posting and again just now. It reports all drives are perfect on both machines. I've also run the standard disk check, and it didn't show any problems either. Also, I have a utility called HD Tune which performs it's own checks, and it reports everything's fine, too, even though it's obviously not.

Also, Acronis Disk Director 11's Recovery tool has recovered all partitions and data 2-3 times on multiple drives, although in some cases the data disappears again later.

If I were to replace all the drives I've seen this weird behavior on in the last 10 days, I'd have to replace eight out of ten of them! I just can't accept that 8 drives suddenly went bad all by themselves independently. Until I know what's been happening, I think it would be a terrible mistake to just replace all eight of them, don't you agree?

I use Driver Genius 9 Professional to make sure I've always got the latest drivers, including for all devices on the mobos. Also, I have the latest BIOS updates available, not just for the mobo but for ICH7R & ICH9R etc.

Given that I've already tried your suggestions, can you think of anything else to try? Can malware be to blame? And what causes a drive to report that more is stored on it than it can physically hold?

Thanks again!

 

[EmmBee19]

Thanks to you, too, goombawaho!

There was a time I suspected the mobo, but now I see the exact same problems on two different motherboards...

The first mobo is a high-end Asus PCI-X workstation with all SATA drives connected either via a brand new PCI-X 4-port SATA-II RAID-capable HBA (just bought a couple of days ago because I thought there was a problem with the on-board SATA ports, but I'm still seeing the same problems with the new card) or are SCSI-360 drives connected with an Adaptec SCSI-320 RAID-capable HBA.

The second mobo is an Intel DQ35MP with all SATA drives connected to the on-board ICH9R.

Since I'm having the same problems with two very different motherboards, do you have any other ideas?

Thanks!

 

[flyboytim]

Are the problems on each machine consistent from one reboot to another? (It appears not from the disappearance and reappearance of partitions.)

Is the power supply in your area stable - i.e. are there possible brownouts due to high winter consumption? Can you put the machines on UPS?

 

[Freestone]

Are all these symptoms apparent outside a Windows environment? I see you mention Disk Director 11. Are you running that from its boot media? Being you now have this on two PCs, I suspect some kind of malware that was transferred from one machine to the next, maybe during your troubleshooting of the first PC. Can you put in a new drive in one of the PCs, reinstall Windows and see if the problem resurfaces. A PITA, but it would help reveal whether your current Window installs are the cause of these issues.

 

[BadBigBen]

Freestone,

thank you, I was about to suggest the same...



EmmBee19,

the suggestion for replacement drive, was to see if it is perhaps HDD related, meaning to replace only one or maybe two drives, as I've seen faulty HDD firmware do weird stuff (Seagate's where the drive just stops working, to Samsungs F3's loosing data)...

but if this is happening to SCSI drives, also, then DO suspect some sort of malware, or corruption of system files... this is where Freestone's suggestion comes in at installing a fresh copy of any OS (Windows or even a Linux distro)...



Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

You've got to regroup here. It's NOT a hard drive problem.
Could it possibly be a power problem??? Do you have a UPS??

Other than that:
Take 1 drive that is giving you a problem but has passed its dignostic tests and do a DBAN wipe of it, then load an operating system on it. That will prove that the drive is virus free.

Then start adding more drives that have (preferably) been wiped or at least scanned outside of a windows environment (like with a BartPE or other bootable disk with virus scanner plugin type of deal).

 

[EmmBee19]

First of all, I want to thank everyone who's replied for their valuable time! This is easily the most responsive support site I've ever encountered, and I'm very impressed by the brains and talent on display!

I apologize for my delay in responding, but you all know the holiday rush... I've got some general updates before I get to the individual responses:

Several times now on Machine 2 (the Intel mobo), the BIOS drive search / checkout during bootup has been unusually slow for at least one SATA drive, then Windows begins to boot up but then I get the dreaded BSD (STOP 0x0000007B). Just out of curiosity, I selected "Reboot Normally" a couple of times and got the same results.

But when I reboot and select "Last Known Good Configuration", the boot time goes back to normal and Windows boots fine! How could changing that effect the boot time in the BIOS? It seems unlikely in the extreme to me. It strikes me that it's more likely that something related to the slow-to-detect drive changed during that time, but it really seems like it's strictly about selecting "Last Known Good Configuration". More weirdness!

What I did prior to seeing the BSD was use Acronis Disk Director 11 (started within Windows, because it's much faster that way) to copy several partitions to backup storage. That machine's backup storage system is a collection of four identical Seagate 1.5 TB drives in a JBOD configuration inside a Rosewill RSV-S4-X 4 Bay SATA enclosure, which connects to Machine 2 via a PCI-E eSATA connection. (Note: Rosewill's got the worst tech support I've ever encountered, so buyer beware. It took nearly 3 months to get them to respond, even with NewEgg's help!)

I like this system because its got it's own power supply so I don't have to worry about stressing my mobo's PSU, and also, I can turn it off when I'm not actually doing a backup or restore so it saves a great deal of hours of drive standby.

I mention all that because, to my knowledge, it's the only configuration change I can think of that might be different between the one resulting in the BSD and the "Last Known Good" config: The Rosewill was on and connected during the backup but powered off when I first got the BSD. I did not turn it on again to get past the BSD; I just selected Last Known Good.


One other update: One of the troublesome hard drives is no longer even detected by any of my computers' BIOS. It's not clicking, it's just no longer detected. The thing is, just 2 days ago it fully passed several SMART tests and it also passed a sector test. The drive temperature monitor reported no problem either. This is my fifth Western Digital to die prematurely, but everyone I know swears by them. The only other premature failure was a Samsung drive. I guess I buy Seagates from now on...

Well, I've got an appointment in a few minutes, so I'll have to stop for now. I plan to respond to individual replies later this morning.

 

[EmmBee19]

My friends, this situation has got me so confused I'm stressing out way too much trying to handle all this -and- the holidays, too. I've got perplexing screen caps galore, but without a coherent narrative to put them in context they'll just be too baffling.

I suspect some or all of you are also very busy right now, so I'm going to put this on hold until after Christmas. When I return, I'm going to focus on just one system at a time and try to organize my observations better.

Merry Christmas, all!

 

[goombawaho]

Good call on delaying this to preserve sanity. If you have a third motherboard/PC, that might be a way of proving whether the drives will behave themselves in a different environment.

You have to get to the point where you can make one drive work consistently or fail consistently. May be more difficult than we think.

 

[kjv1611]

One thing that's been mentioned, but not replied to by the OP is power issues. EmmBee19, are you absolutely certain that you don't have some odd power issue causing all of this? How are the power supplies in each machine? If you can get one machine running with just one hard drive, and see how it runs for a while (as goombawaho suggested), you may find that perhaps you're just shy of enough juice coming from your PSUs, maybe?

What brands of PSUs do you have? Are they generics? Are they rated well on efficiency? Do they push much wattage at all?

In your home or business, are you having any other issues that seem odd - non-computer-related - but related to your electricity?

Do you have access to a UPS as was suggested, that you can try for a few days and see if the problem is alleviated?

 

[JimInKS]

I just scanned this, but I did see this thread about drives greater than 1Tb causing issues. Maybe you will get some ideas from there. You never said in your original post how long this configuration might have been working correctly.

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/whshardware/thread/c36d7aa9-50d4-4af7-9ff9-dd465f31216d

 

[flyboytim]

JimInKS' link is certainly worth reading, down to the last post, & some of the related topics. Although it mainly refers to Windows 2003 Home Server, the actual problems with large SATA drives seem to be universal, affecting XP to Windows 7, on some motherboards.

The solution seems to be to use AHCI.

AHCI drivers are native on Vista and later, but are available for XP and 2003. Various links to solutions available within the above link.