Question Internal HDD keeps randomly appearing and disappearing ?

[Nugget]

I just gave my friend my old pc in which we done a clean wipe for his new windows account, we had a perfectly fine internal hard drive installed and after a day of installing games to it, the hard drive disappeared.. No trace of it in the bios, on windows nor on the disk management so we couldn't find the problem. We tried everything to find it using chkdsk and trying to rescan disks as well as unplugging and plugging the hard drive back in.

We thought this one had coincidently failed or broke so we installed another hard drive which seemed to be working fine for a day of installing games to it and even playing them and creating restore points. However, when he shut it down or put it to sleep mode, the hard drive again would disappear. We again tried all the stuff we had tried before and had the exact same problem with a different hard drive. After a day, he turned the pc on to find the hard drive appearing on windows like nothing had happened, all the files and games where there and all was fine. But we decided to re format it and change its volume letter and name and re install everything to it.

This seemed to work for 1-2 days until this afternoon where he turned the pc on and the hard drive, yet again, had disappeared. At this point we had enough of this so we just left it until about an hour ago where he turned it on hoping that it would magically appear again and it did. At first we thought it was a game called ARK: survival evolved corrupting the disk after the first time the hard drive disappeared after playing the game and the second time where he installed it, the hard drive disappeared. But when we didnt install it to the new hard drive it still managed to disappear so at this point we are truly stumped so if anyone has any suggestions on what might be happening we are all ears.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Welcome !

Interesting, have you tried using different SATA ports on the motherboard and different cables SATA data and power cables? Just to rule that out.

Do the hard drives still show up in the BIOS after they have gone missing in Windows?

On the Windows side I have no idea why this would happen after a day or two, weird.

 

[Nugget]

Hello there!

Yes, we had tried different Sata ports and sata cables but still had the same problem.
When the drives go missing there is no trace in windows nor on the BIOS.
We searched all over the web and found nothing so this is are last resort :/

 

[Brian Boru]

Welcome to the forum

Check drive manufacturer's site for any software updates—drivers, diagnostics, maintenance etc.

Are these HDs or SSDs or NVMEs?
Assume it's a desktop, not laptop. What make/model?

Look in Device Manager for any yellow warning icons—expand sections to see individual components. Storage section mainly.
Check Reliability Monitor and/or Event Viewer for any warnings around the times of the problem happening.

It's a strange one—any time I've had something like that, changing SATA port or cable fixed it.

Do you have Windows on Fast Start? Disable that.

It seems most likely there is something in the reboot or wake-up processes which is bypassing the drive for some reason. I'm not familiar with all that, so disable any 'fancy' stuff you can find, eg power boosters, RAM boosters, turbo settings etc etc.

Try rebooting into Safe Mode say 5 times, if it sees the drive each time.

Kind of flailing around in the dark here Troubleshooting is often about eliminating what isn't the problem, which can take a while.

If you can post specs, that will help so we can eliminate things like suspect Power Supply or known buggy Motherboard etc.

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[Nugget]

Hello, than you for the reply
We had checked to see if there were any drivers or software updates for both of the hard drives that we put in, which there were none. We are dealing with HDD'S and using a pre built, zoomstorm stormforce tornado pc. When the hard drive is gone we cannot find it anywhere but when it is back it says its healthy with no alerts. We changed the sata ports, sata cables and power cables for the hard drive but no change.

The specs of the pc are the following:
Motherboard- Asus H170-PRO
Gpu- GTX 1060
CPU- I5 6400
1st hdd (this one went missing first)- Western Digital Blue 2TB
2nd hdd (swapped this one in to see if the 1st hard drive was the problem) - Samsung 1TB
Power supply- 500 watts (not sure what make)

We have disabled hybrid sleep but will disable Windows Fast Start.

When the drives go missing we restart around 5 times each time and still the hard drive is missing.

At this present time, the hard drive is showing but this is not the first time as the last time it was showing in Windows, a few hours later it disappeared again.

The first time it disappeared on the first hard drive was after the installation of Ark: Survival Evolved and Genshin Impact in which we looked to see where the games were stored in which we found the hard drive had gone missing. This happened without any restart, shut down or sleep so our first assumption was that one of the games were messing the hard drive up either by corrupting it or something else. After troubleshooting and looking for solutions for a while, the hard drive appeared again in which we checked everything again to see it was healthy but again disappeared in which we could not find it again. So we replaced it with another used hard drive from a pc we had here, which at first worked fine until we shut it down. After we turned it back on the hard drive yet again disappeared but this was with a different hard drive at this point, we had re formatted it and re named it. We installed some games to it which we thought was the reason again. Yesterday, it decided to re appear again and has been fine since but I want to make sure and found out what has been making this happen.

When we tried installing Ark the second time, a notification came up on steam saying it could not write to disk and disappeared a few hours later.


We have not tried to install ark again due to the two times that we did, the hard drive had disappeared.

There seems to be a common relationship with the installation of games and a restart/shut down but that is just a guess.

EDIT: The pc just went into sleep mode, in which after the hard drive has now gone again. We restarted and it came back so i think putting the pc into sleep mode affects the hard drive? We turned off the setting where the pc would go into sleep mode within 30 minutes.

 

[Colif]

tried updating bios on motherboard?

3 different drives don't just vanish, have you tried drives on other PC to confirm they okay?

make/model of PSU might help. I have seen bad PSU kill drives before. Its happened to me, though a long time ago now.

 

[Nugget]

Hello!
We have not tried updating the bios no, im not sure how to do that but im sure there are some tutorials on the web...
We have only had problems with two drives in which they do come back, its not like they are permanently deleted or anything. We tried the first one in another pc in which it did not recognise it. The second one we have not tried in another pc but there isn't a spare one at hand.
The second hard drive goes and comes, it usually either comes back randomly or after a few restarts.
I will try to find the PSU model/make as well and report back since im working on behalf of my friend.

Thank you everyone for your replies, hopefully we can sort this out!!

 

[Colif]

Hello!
We have not tried updating the bios no, im not sure how to do that but im sure there are some tutorials on the web...

Asus are helpful: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1151/B250M-BASALT/E13571_BIOS_Update_EM_V4_WEB.pdf

note: yes, that isn't your board but I got it from: https://www.asus.com/au/supportonly/h170pro/HelpDesk_Manual/
So I assume it works the same still.

 

[Nugget]

Asus are helpful: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1151/B250M-BASALT/E13571_BIOS_Update_EM_V4_WEB.pdf

note: yes, that isn't your board but I got it from: https://www.asus.com/au/supportonly/h170pro/HelpDesk_Manual/
So I assume it works the same still.

The version of the BIOS is American Megatrends Inc. 9014, 20/12/2016...

Im guessing that means the bios needs to be updated?

I've figured out how to but I dont want to update it if it is up to date already

 

[Nugget]

UPDATE:

We just updated the bios, and after restart the hard drive starts to click every 1-2 seconds. Now when we had the hard drive before it worked fine, it only usually happened when we put it into sleep mode. I dont think it is the hard drive dying as there is no way that two hard drive coincidently both die when before installing them to the pc they were fine. We logged back into see the hard drive was gone. I think when the hard drive clicks that means it goes...

So I assume the bios update did not work :/

At this point I am starting to get worried.

Maybe purchasing an external hard drive or a brand new internal drive might be the best thing to do? I just dont want this to happen to them and waste money.

EDIT: We still have not gotten the hard drive back

 

[Colif]

clicking isn't what you want to hear from a hdd
it may not come back

hdd heads can make clicking noises if they are touching the platters inside drives. Generally its not a good thing to hear.

what power supply does it have?

PC shouldn't kill hdd. so before you put anything else in that is new, I would see what PSU is. If its old., it might need to be replaced or it could just keep killing new drives whenever they go to sleep.

 

[Brian Boru]

clicking isn't what you want to hear from a hdd
it may not come back

Absolutely, that's bad news. I recommend stop messing around with the drives for now, there may be something—eg PSU—which is gradually damaging them.

One basic Q I don't think we asked yet:
How much free space is on these HDDs, and have they been defragged recently?

 

[Nugget]

Good morning!

Yes,the clicking only seems to be happening when it goes into sleep mode or after a restart/shut down. I asked some friends and they also suggested that the power supply may be causing this considering it is a 5 year old power supply...

I'm still unsure of the make of the power supply but I dont think we are able to find that out at this moment in time...

On the topic of space, the first disk has 2tb and the second disk has 1tb, and no they have not been defragged, only formatted. However, when they disappear we cannot do anything with them as the pc doesn't even recognise there is a hard disk inside on it which makes it even harder to find the problem.


I will be going to collect the pc soon so we can see futher what the problem is, but when we had the pc here, we used a power extension which had surge protection on it... Do you think this could be the problem?

 

[Nugget]

Ok, so this is probably the final post..

When we booted the pc up, this came up: Warning: Please back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail. Meaning the hard drive is defiantly broken..
Still dont know what breaks it but my best assumption is that its the power supply.

 

[Nugget]

Instead of a hard disk, would an ssd be ok? Would it have the same problems as a hard drive?

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

The PSU problem if that's what you have, would come from it supplying constantly either too much or too little power to the hard drive or possibly spikes of high voltage in certain conditions. A SATA SSD would get the same power but might not react in the same way I guess. It would still break though.

Also if that PSU is doing that to your hard drives it could well be doing the same to everything else in the system.

 

[Nugget]

The PSU problem if that's what you have, would come from it supplying constantly either too much or too little power to the hard drive or possibly spikes of high voltage in certain conditions. A SATA SSD would get the same power but might not react in the same way I guess. It would still break though.

Also if that PSU is doing that to your hard drives it could well be doing the same to everything else in the system.

Considering the m.2 has not been affected nor has anything else to my knowledge Im not too sure. I also was thinking that an external hard drive or ssd might be safer but if not i guess we will have to replace the PSU

 

[Brian Boru]

to my knowledge

There's the catch. Disks can be seen to deteriorate as you've seen, but other components tend to fail suddenly without warning.