HDD "disappearing"

Mr_squishy

[FONT=&quot]Hi all,

I have recently starting having trouble with one of my hard drives.
The one in question is one of two 500Gb Sata drives, and is about 2 years old.
In the last week I started receiving delayed write errors for the drive and not being able to access it. When I went to My Computer the drive was not visible there, so I checked in computer management via the admin tools and it was not there either.

I rebooted my machine and had a glimmer of hope when I saw the drive in BIOS and POST but as soon as I got into windows it had gone again.

To check it wasn’t the drive that had gone I purchased a USB caddy for the drive and plugged it in and that worked fine with no files missing /corrupt.

A friend suggested repairing windows so I did that and it didn’t work, but shortly after installation it asked for the driver disk and it worked, but not for long. I updated the drivers again through device manager and it came back with new drivers found and the drive worked.

Now today (2 days later) the drive has disappeared again but going through the update drive method now just brings back, you already have the latest driver.

I have tried rebooting my machine when this happens, I have even left the machine on overnight after successful access to the drive but nothing seems to make a difference.

It also only affect this one drive (Maxtor) the other SAT is Samsung, any known problems with these?

Any help would be appreciated.[/FONT]

exup

is there another sata port you can use or swap them over to make sure its not a cable or mobo problem - if you use the drive quite abit then you may be looking at a new drive - i did hear an average of about 3 years for HDD life before the bearings start giving up. I had a maxtor which started making funny noises after about 2 1/2 years so cloned it onto a new drive.

Mr_squishy

Hi I have tried all the other sata ports on my Mobo (6 in total) and tried several different cables.

My last Maxtor lasted over 10 years which is why I went with them again.

I have just realised that the driver it install is from the mobo driver cd ( NVidia storage driver) however it only seems to be causing problems with that drive and not my other SATA drive ( Samsung)