Re: SATA drive no longer detected by BIOS

Arno Wagner wrote:
Previously ohaya <ohaya@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

I have a WD 500GB SATA drive that has been working in my system for awhile (~9 months). This system has Windows 2003 Server on it, and I had 3 partitions on the 500GB drive.

This afternoon, when I powered the system on, I noticed that the BIOS startup display wasn't showing the drive, so I went into BIOS, and sure enough, it was not displayed there. If I pressed Enter on that SATA channel, it would take a really long time, then display the drive description. But, then after I saved the settings, and booted and it displayed the drive, there as a line that read something like: "SMART command failed".

When I got into Windows, the partitions on the drive don't appear. I also tried Computer Management->Disk Management and Rescan, and it doesn't show the drive at all.

I've tried several different SATA cables with this drive on my machine, but still see the same problem. I've also tried moving the drive to another machine, and that other machine's BIOS couldn't detect the drive either.

I'm guessing that the drive is bad (duh :(!), and I've contacted Western Digital to see what they say, but I was hoping that someone here might be able to suggest something else that I can try?

Thanks in advance,
Jim

Have you, by chance, ignored a failed SMART status message during bootup in the past?

Arno


Hi,

I don't think so.

I know that you all are probably not going to believe me/this, but I think that I've figured out what caused this problem. I myself am having a hard time believing it, and I've been trying to discount it myself, but anyway, one thing that I did not mention (again, because up until about 1/2 hour ago ago, I was discounting it myself) was that I had just purchased an external USB hard drive this afternoon, and I had just plugged it into the system at the time that this happened.

At this point, I believe that the USB hard drive somehow (I don't understand how) caused the problem that I'm having with the SATA drive.

The reason that I'm saying this is that a little while ago, after removing the SATA drive and checking that what I had left was intact, I decided to plug that USB drive in again (again, I kept thinking that plugging it in this afternoon and the SATA problem was a coincidence).

Anyway, after plugging the USB drive in again tonight, I immediately started having problems with the PATA drives. One of them, a 200GB Samsung originally had 4 partitions on it. After plugging the USB drive in, and booting the system, that 200GB drive now has only the 1st partition. In Disk Management, the rest of the drive is shown as "Unallocated".

At this point, I am totally puzzled about what the XXXX is going on, and my system is seriously crippled :(...

Jim
.

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