Randomly 1 out of my 4hdds dissapear - never the OS drive

Hi guys,

Randomly 1 of my 4 hdd's dissapear in windows - its never the os drive. It is usually my 500gig samsung or my 320gb maxtor. I presume its the power supply that is causing this as the drives have never appeared to show any sign of fault.

The hdd's will show in Windows , then randomly after coming out of standby one hdd will be missing. I then need to power the machine off and sometimes unplug and replug the power cables in to the hdd's. It then is back at next boot, but dissapears again etc.

Also the pc randomly reboots - never when i'm here - I get home and its rebooted and is back on the login screen. So i'm guessing this PSU is faulty - its about 1-2 years old.

Whats drawing power - q6600, 8400gs, 4x hdd's, 1x external hdd via usb, 1x 17" screen, 1x dvd writer, 1x wifi card and about 6 case fans (2x 120, 4x 80)

The PSU is a 460watt gigabyte. I have a coolermaster 500 watt somewhere I could swap. Is there any way I can determine if its the PSU without swapping it out? (no heat problems I can see via SIW , bios etc)

Regards,
J

You using VISTA?

Check your event log, look for anything related to a drive or controller error?

shaddowdragon said:

You using VISTA?

Click to expand...

win 7

J

nihilist said:

Check your event log, look for anything related to a drive or controller error?

Click to expand...

The top entry appears several times, the bottom one once...

However since this happens to multiple drives and I have unplugged and replugged the cables I assume it to be PSU related. I don't know what the chances of 2 hdd's failing at once would be, 2 different manufacturers, bought at a different time etc. It must be dodgy power...

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR7.

The driver detected a controller error on \...\DR4.

J

mmm, I got that on Vista. Was told not to put a system drive on the second SATA port. Put SATA DVD ROM there instead and the system would spatter a bit and then come back. This however was specific to the M3N-HD/HDMI board with an NVidia 750 chipset. Seemed to apply to both 750a/i on the ASUS forum.

Tried a different drive on the same port and that new drive also disappeared. Only seemed to happen when I started a game installed on same HDD as Firefox and it was also running. Unfortunately I had Firefox on half the time so took drive out and left DVD ROM Drive connected put replacement drive on third SATA port.

Original drive is now in another machine and it gave same act until I installed VISTA SP2. So, Drive works now under any load and I left with a mystery and many possible answers.

1 Drive is faulty and VISTA SP2 has better fault tolerances/Drive management.
2 Drive's firmware did not work well with SP1.
3 Drive is half dead and because reason 1 it keeps on holding on.

No firmware updates done on either motherboard. Just make sure there is nothing important on either drives in case you find out what is really wrong the hard way. Faulty hard drive now carries non critical data to keep it company just in case.

PS: I am running an Athlon 3800+, 40gig, 200gig, 360gig, 2x500gig drives, Dvd Writer, 8600GS Graphics, 2x12cm Fans and 14cm (in Antek 300) with Media Lab (Black [Thermaltake]) on a 370 ODIN Gigabyte power supply). All happy.
Machine OC 10% CPU and Memory.