HDD disappears!

ChrisJakarta
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HDD disappears!

Post by ChrisJakarta »

I have a desktop unit running XP-Home, SP3. It has two hard disk drives in it. The 'main' SATA drive has several partitions (drives C, D, E, G and S - for pagefile), with Windows on drive C:, and is shown as in "Disk Management" as Disk 1. The other drive, an older IDE, is the boot drive, booting to Grub, to allow me to select booting to Linux Mint. During the boot process, GRUB automatically boots to Windows within a few moments unless I intervene to select Mint.

This drive, which is shown as Disk 0 in "Disk Management" has several Linux partitions, but also a NTFS partition that I use for backups, and which appears as Drive H:. When it appears! It is always there when I boot, but disappears some time later for no apparent reason, and is then not accessible without re-booting. Disk 0 also disappears totally from "Disk Management", and the drive disappears from the Hardware list.

Is it perhaps automatically powering down, and thus disappearing? Or perhaps there's some other explanation? Any ideas how I can correct this? Am I asking too much from such a curious setup?

Chris

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Claude
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Re: HDD disappears!

Post by Claude »

Can you see them in the BIOS ?
Cheers, Claude.

ChrisJakarta
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Re: HDD disappears!

Post by ChrisJakarta »

Claude wrote:Can you see them in the BIOS ?
Yes, although of course that is the start of the boot process. As I say, the IDE Drive (Disk 0) is accessed during the boot process by the Linux Grub. AFAIK, I've no way to look at the BIOS while Windows is running.

Another couple of things:

1. I checked the HDD status in Mint. In the Power settings, there is an option to 'Spin down hard disks when possible'. This is unchecked.

2. In the Disk Management, when Disk 0 appears, right-clicking drive H: has the option (which does not show on other drives): "Mark Partition as Active". What would happen if I clicked this? I'm a bit loath to try without some idea...

Chris
Last edited by ChrisJakarta on 09 Jan 2011, 07:50, edited 1 time in total.

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Claude
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Re: HDD disappears!

Post by Claude »

"Mark Partition as Active".
If it was me, I'd go for it, but, probably best to wait for some other inputs around here....
Cheers, Claude.

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StuartR
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Re: HDD disappears!

Post by StuartR »

This sounds like a hardware fault to me. If the disk drive does not even appear under disk management then that means that Windows thinks it does not exist at all.

Marking a partition active will not affect this.

The disk being powered down by the onboard firmware will not affect this, as it will spin it back up again when it is needed. This just causes a delay.
StuartR


ChrisJakarta
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Re: HDD disappears! SOLVED

Post by ChrisJakarta »

A follow-up on this problem. The BIOS setting noted that this HDD was configured as a slave, and this being the only IDE disk, there was no master. When I finally got around to opening up the unit, I found that the jumper configured it for 'cable select' and I guess it was connected to the wrong plug. I changed the jumper to 'master', jiggled all the plugs and restarted. Now all seems to be well, and the HDD is continually seen by Windows.

Was it the configuration or just a poor plug contact? I don't know...

Chris

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viking33
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Re: HDD disappears!

Post by viking33 »

My guess is that it was the slave configuration that caused this.
BOB
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