Disappearing Hard Drive

[Cryofax]

I wonder if anyone here has run into this issue... Whenever my HTPC comes out of sleep mode, one of the two hard drives disappears. It's a 3tb Seagate SATA drive running in IDE mode. I've read that bigger drives can take a few extra seconds to spin up and some motherboard drivers will "miss them" as they come out of sleep and they're gone until reboot.

There is a microsoft "hotfix" for this but apparently it's included in SP1, which I have. So that isn't the issue. Some have reported problems in AHCI mode, but I'm not running that. I'm using the Windows 7 SATA drivers. I am considering getting the NForce4 drivers for it, but being an older 939 motherboard I was happy to let Windows 7 take over that duty. Anyway for now not letting it ever sleep

[CharlieWayne]

Check your power management settings.

[Cryofax]

Check your power management settings.

The whole machine wakes just fine from sleep via keypress or PME (i.e. someone turns on an extender) and everything comes up fine but the one hard drive. The hard drive is not set to spin down on its own via power management. It only does so (as it should) in sleep mode. No way to have sleep mode without that.

[CharlieWayne]

I bought the same drives over the holiday and had issues with them falling out of RAID due to them spinning down due to the PC being idle. Thats why I suggested power management as that's how I fixed my issue.

When the PC wakes up and u can't see the drive via windows explorer, does it show up in disk management?

[Cryofax]

I bought the same drives over the holiday and had issues with them falling out of RAID due to them spinning down due to the PC being idle. Thats why I suggested power management as that's how I fixed my issue.

Ah so you stopped the hard drive spin down at idle? That's sort of how mine is "fixed" for the time being (no sleep mode allowed. I already had the HD spin down turned off). But I really don't want it running 24/7. I have two other computer with big hard drives that have no trouble returning from sleep, but for whatever reason the drivers' on this 939 don't cooperate. Which is why I'm considering going to the nVidia nForce4 drivers instead of Windows 7's.

When the PC wakes up and u can't see the drive via windows explorer, does it show up in disk management?

Yeah it's gone from Explorer, Disk Management, Device Manager. *poof*.

[CharlieWayne]

I would suggest manually checking if there are updates for ur bios, chip set, and controllers.

My issue was that out of the 5 exact hard drives the issue was with only one of them. I never had the PC set up to sleep but the issue happened when the disks would spin down for power savings. Again the issue was only with one disk of the 5, but I never spent lots of time doing diag either.

Do you run an SSD for your OS? SSD software makes lots of changes to power management either to peak out performance or reliability.

[Cryofax]

I would suggest manually checking if there are updates for ur bios, chip set, and controllers.

Yeah I've been doing that but being an old chipset (nForce4) the updates stopped a while back prior to Windows 7. I have found some updated ones by third parties, but I'm treading with caution before I do that.

My issue was that out of the 5 exact hard drives the issue was with only one of them. I never had the PC set up to sleep but the issue happened when the disks would spin down for power savings. Again the issue was only with one disk of the 5, but I never spent lots of time doing diag either.

That's interesting. I wonder if I have a runt of the litter. Perhaps I should see about replacing it to see if I get the same issue.

Do you run an SSD for your OS? SSD software makes lots of changes to power management either to peak out performance or reliability.

Not on that machine. About the only thing "out of the ordinary" I can think of is it is a 3tb drive, so it's using Windows' GPT mode so I get all 3tb on one partition.

UPDATE : I'm looking into issues with GPT drives disappearing. I wouldn't mind formatting it as 2 partitions (1tb and 2tb) if that solves it but no answers yet. I see some others with a similar issue though...

[CharlieWayne]

You say you have other large drives?

What if you try a different large drive in the same troubled machine.

Divide to Conquer.

Outside of those ideas I would say start Google searching like us already are.

[superblast]

I've had the same problem with a 3TB Seagate drive in my Media Center system. Intel chipset and processor, set to AHCI and it's always been set to never sleep but every six months or so, it just disappears from the system. The only way I can get it back is to power down the machine. Unplug that drive. Power it up. Down. Plug in the drive and then power it back up! Then everything's back to normal. I've switched out the SATA cable and upgraded the controller drivers but it still happens from time to time. I've got another 3TB Seagate (same model) in my main system and it's failing at the moment. Luckily I set up a NAS recently and have a backup of that drive. Haven't used Seagate in a long time until these drives and now I remember why!