SATA drives no longer detected (show up intermittantly)

Status
Not open for further replies.
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
When I built my computer I did the ballsy (dumb) move of setting it up as RAID 0 with mirroring. Last night my computer stopped detecting the drives.

I've already written off the data nbd. Now I am trying to re install windows. For the first couple of times I started it up I couldn't find the drives. Then I unplugged the drives and found them.

I finally got Vista to install (after disconnecting one of the drives), and then it seems like windows couldn't find the drive again, and booted from the CD that I just installed from (I had changed the boot order from CD rom to hard drive again). Ran it again and then it finished the installation.

I am suspicious that the sata controller has died/is dying or that the hard drive is dying. But I don't know for sure. I can buy a new hard drive to test my theory, or use an old IDE hard drive I have sitting around (as it uses a different controller, I think).

Any thoughts?

Edit: Got the install, windows started normally, then BAM BSOD.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
what am I checking the settings in my BIOS for? I mean to say, that's a very generic response. It's kind of like if someone told me there was something wrong with their car and I told them "Open the hood" like that was the answer. What specifically am I looking for in the BIOS that can tell me about the SATA controller or HDDs?
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

see if anything changed on your RAID settings, or if you are trying to run one drive at a time with the setting still set to RAID.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
no I already changed everything back to the standard IDE mode.

Edit: Well, I got it booted back up and now I am running a chckdsk on the drive. Its at ~80% now and still chugging along (god this takes forever.) I'm going to do a thorough check for bad caps when that is done, and try some seagate thing out.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Does your controller require a driver to be present during install (from floppy or USB drive)? I've never installed Vista, dunno if that's still a thing.

--Patrick
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
If I install the drives as AHCI then yeah it would, but for IDE it doesn't. I ran a full chkdsk on one of the hard drives last night and there were no bad sectors. Makes me think that it's either the other hard drive that is bad or the gigabyte sata2 controller. If it's the latter I believe I can go buy an Sata thing to hook into a PCI slot and use the onboard intel controller for the hard drives.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I have an old Dell that would still beg for a driver disk on install, you just had to choose whether you wanted the (AHCI mode) or (IDE mode) version of the driver when prompted. If the drive keeps disappearing regardless of your BIOS setting or drivers, that's probably a good hint that it's a hardware problem (or incompatibility) though. Other things to check might be: SSC settings, SATA 150/300 setting, whether the drives support TLER/CCTL (if the controller expects it), even whether the drives are physically touching anything (or each other) inside the case.

Personally, I'd mount 'em one at a time into a known-good system and then thrash the bejeezus out of each one for a goodly amount of hours just to see if it really is the drive.

--Patrick
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Sorry I should be clear, the drive shows up fine now. But on a couple of startups I have gotten a BSOD. It dissapeared off the screen before I could read it though.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Necronic said:
Sorry I should be clear, the drive shows up fine now. But on a couple of startups I have gotten a BSOD. It dissapeared off the screen before I could read it though.
Click to expand...
When you reboot, do an F8 and tell it to turn off rebooting on system failure... see if you can read the stop code after that.

But usually, blue screens during boot means a repair-install is in the works :/
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top