Help My HDD has disappeared

Hi

I was wondering if someone could help please

I have two sata HDD in my PC (not in Raid). The C: drive is my main drive and has all programs on. The second is my media drive and is where I store music and movies etc. I have XP Home.

Both HDD have been in and working fine since November 06.

I turned my PC on today and the 2nd HDD has disappeared. I tried a restart but that didnt work. It doesnt show up in device manager at all.

Over the last few days it has been a bit sluggish in responding and the pc crashed a few times when accessing the 2nd drive.

Does anyone have any ideas as I have no clue.

Please and Thank you.

That doesn't sound good. I presume you have it backed-up?

I had this same issue on my 2nd hard drive on my old rig (ATA though) - I went through the whole process of changing cables, re-seating cables, ensuring that power was correctly connected, wandering through the bios. Virus checks, spybots, trojan, hijack this scan etc - nothing. Sometimes it would show, sometimes not. In the end I could not find a reason why this was happening, so I removed the drive from the case, attatched it to a spare USB box I have, replaced the internal drive with a new one and copied the contents across (the drive could be seen through the USB...go figure!) I had a back up of the hard drive on another USB box anyway

I made the assumption that the drive was on its way out and with the cost of hard drives being what they are it wasn't worth the anxiety that if it would eventually fail - just the certainty that it would. Once replaced, problem solved..

My suggestion - make sure your mobo is up to date with bios and chipset, re-seat your RAM, check out the cables and power supply and back it up if you can NOW (if not already done so,) using a USB caddy, and plan on replacing the hard drive immediately. The pain of total data loss is not worth the hassle.

On another point with drives getting so big @ 1TB, back-up strategies become even more important - but how to cope with those sort of sizes? Sure RAID 1 or software such as Acronis will help but for the un-educated buying a computer from PC World with a 300-500GB hard drive onto which they put all their photos, movies, documents and everything else - its a disaster waiting to happen..

Yeah, it sounds like a lose cable. Just disconnect all the cables to the HDD in question and reconnect them.

Sounds like its dead/dying to me. Does the HDD show up in the BIOS?

To expand on the above, if it shows up fine in the BIOS then it's something in Windows, possibly malware. If it doesn't then either it's the drive, the cable, or just possibly the motherboard. To discount the last two, change the cable and change the mobo header.

also, if you can, try to touch the drive. if its getting hot, it means its spinning up and could be working. if its stone cold, its dead.

I had the same issue, it occured when I was playing cod2. The game froze and I had to re boot, I came into BIOS screen and it said RAID5 not bootable! even though it was a RAID0 :p, and it said I only had one HDD. I reset the cmos and that did the trick. :)