Windows – Disappearing Hard Disk

hard drivewindows 7

Symptom: I will be using the drive normally, playing a game that has been installed to it, and the game will freeze, almost freezing the entire system, then crash. My Computer no longer displays the drive. The Disk Manager no longer displays the drive (in fact, the drive count is off now, Drive 1 is missing, but 0/2/3/4 are all there).

System Events related to the disk in the order that they occured (Event ID)

  1. The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort5 (11)
  2. The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, is not ready for access yet. (15)
  3. An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation. (51)
  4. The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur. (57)

Each of these is repeated multiple times in a row, from 2 to 200 or so.

What I've tried so far

Cleared some space on the drive, its now down to around half full.

Replaced the SATA cable, and plugged it into a different receiving port on the MB. Also re-seated the power cable.

Other assorted Notes

The drive will reappear on reboot, and work normally for an uncertain length of time, depending on amount of access, before failing again with the same errors and behavior.

I recently upgraded my video card from 2 GeForce 9500's to 1 GeForce 440.

600W power supply.

If there's any other data you need, please ask for it, I either dont know you need it, or need to look it up myself.

UPDATE: SMART
Here are the smart attributes for the drive in question. Im not 100% certain I understand these completely…but they dont look like they flag anything as an actual failure…

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000b   100   100   016    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005   131   131   054    Pre-fail  Offline      -       147
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0007   115   115   024    Pre-fail  Always       -       176 (Average 178)
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       2373
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   005    Pre-fail  Always       -       1
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000b   100   100   067    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0005   131   131   020    Pre-fail  Offline      -       29
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       24969
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   060    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1195
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2881
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2881
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0002   193   193   000    Old_age   Always       -       31 (Min/Max 12/50)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       2
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0008   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       19

Best Answer

Good news is you're tried a good bunch of the obvious hardware troubleshootage - though i'd hope/assume you used a known good cable and port when swapping sata drives.

The bad news is there's a good chance the drive is dying. Where and when it works, it would be a VERY good idea to back it up. You will also want to run the disk tools your hard drive provider has (seatools for seagate and so on). My Seagate 7200.11 (yes that one) had similar symptoms before dropping dead (and i hadn't backed it up. Better yet, my other backups were on that drive). I RMAed it, and got a replacement - specific model had a firmware issue, but it would depend on the drive and other symptoms.

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