Thread: Need thoughts on a problem.

So, my storage drive has acquired the peculiar habit of not being detected by the motherboard on the same SATA port in the morning. If I leave it on port 6 overnight, it won't be detected on port 6 in the morning, but will be on, say, port 5. The next morning, it won't be detected on port 5, but will be detected back on port 6. In addition, the hot plugging feature of my motherboard doesn't seem to function correctly (as I was hoping I could hot plug the HDD when I saw the message in Windows).

It's a very old HDD, so it doesn't surprise me and it doesn't bother me that I have to rotate it through the SATA ports, but I wanted to get some of our techies' thoughts on what the issue might be.

Is it the HDD or the Mb that is having the problem? I take it your other drives are detected just fine, and you only have to swap around this one?

Originally Posted by dex71

Is it the HDD or the Mb that is having the problem? I take it your other drives are detected just fine, and you only have to swap around this one?

Correct. The SSD is in port 5 and has no detection issues.

I'd get a new storage drive. Most likely, it's having some sort of power failure on startup, thus not getting detected. It very well may be a precurser to complete failure.

It could be the drive or a power supply problem. What brand, and model is the drive? How old is it?

I had a similar issue several years ago with several drives that started failing to spin up my drives or they would drop out. It turned out to be the power supply (it went out completely a few days later which made it obvious).

I would recommend backing up any important files to DropBox, OneDrive, or Google Drive ASAP (like NOW).

Originally Posted by shatter99

It could be the drive or a power supply problem. What brand, and model is the drive? How old is it?

I had a similar issue several years ago with several drives that started failing to spin up my drives or they would drop out. It turned out to be the power supply (it went out completely a few days later which made it obvious).

I would recommend backing up any important files to DropBox, OneDrive, or Google Drive ASAP (like NOW).

It's not the power supply. 2 and a half years running and with a 5 year warranty (thanks, SeaSonic). The HDD is a 5 or 6 year old 650GB Western Digital Caviar Black, one of their better consumer drives. The only thing of value I have on it is my digital music collection which is already backed up on Dropbox.

Have you tried another drive on ports 5/6? That'll let you know if it's a MB or drive issue.

Yes, I have put other drives in the same slots and they are detected at POST normally. I knew it was the drive from the day it started happening and I'm still not worried, I just wanted other peoples' inputs.

For the record, the drive DOES spin up during POST, but it doesn't seem to send a signal over SATA unless I put it in another SATA port. The drive will also work properly at POST if the computer has been on recently (ie. less than an hour since power down).

Almost like it needs to get revving first. Good thing HDDs are kinda cheap again. You could also get one of those 4TB HDDs, too.

The simplest fix is usually the right one. The drive is probably dying like others have stated. Get a new WD drive and you can use the free WD Acronis software on WD's website to clone the drive to the new one. After that you can easily expand the partition to the full size of the new drive.

Keep in mind that WD's version of Acronis will only work from a WD drive to a WD drive.

WD Support