Re: SATA drive no longer detected by BIOS

Arno Wagner wrote in news:5qdag6FvjecqU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Previously ohaya <ohaya@xxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

Aha.

Babblebot has an 'aha' moment.

I agree, this is unexpected.

Really.


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 :(...

Hmm. Since the disks seem otherwise fine, I would rule out electrical
problems. Drivers should not be able to cause this type of issue.

My guess would be that there was some kind of malware on the
external drive and that it is causing this. You might want to scan
your computer carefully for virusses and the external drive too.
It may also be some fundamentally broken "disk mamagement soft-
ware" that thinks all drives only have one large partition on them.
Or that manages your internal drives instead of the external one.

Or .. or .. or whatever else comes up in your totally cooked brainpan, babblebot.


Arno
.

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