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Community Newsletter: Q&A: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
- 9/28/07 3:22 PM
Re: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
by Szypura - 9/29/07 7:28 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hello,
You do not explain, what particularly you did with your PC?
1. At first you have to see in BIOS [an access via Del or function key during warming up the PC before starting]
2. You should check the sets of all your HDD [preferable adjustments is Auto]
I suppose that you did not change partition's adjustment of your second HDD from primary into logical!
Only C: partition should be primary the all others should be logical! otherwise then could be conflict of an access in PC!
You shoul restart PC from rescue disk eg. Partition Magic of PowerQuest or another partitioner, then you could change setting of the partitions and also to format the chosen partitions.
Regards,
WJS
wjs@vp.pl
Each separate hard drive can have a primary bootable partion
by bobhinton8st - 10/2/07 6:02 PM In reply to: Re: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by SzypuraMy secondary hard drive has a primary bootable partion "D", with the old Windows SE OS still on it from when it was the primary hard drive from an earlier system. Win XP sees and writes to it quite well. Windows XP boots from the primary bootable partition "C" of my newer primary hard drive. It sees all the logical partitions on both drives as well. There has never been a conflict problem.
RE: My Second Hard Drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing
by doogie70_3 - 9/29/07 7:50 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hi, Have you checked that the Data cable (IDE/SATA) is correctly installed in the drives. The other possibility is that the cable is damaged and this could be causing the intermittant failure you are seeing
Disappearing hard drive
by margaritabuddy - 9/29/07 8:45 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Wendy,
I've not seen this suggested in the posts so far, so for what it's worth...I have 2 suggestions: 1) Some drive mfgrs. have some pretty decent drive testing s/w that comes with the drive or downloadable from their site, so if that's available to you, that's one idea. The second idea deals with the age of your machine (I've not kept up with the e-machine models very well), but I'm wondering if you might be experiencing a flaky secondary channel on your mainboard. I have actually seen that on a machine I used to have. I'd get random failures on the machine (single drive machine), while it was running. I'd turn it off for a minute or 2, boot it back up and it would be fine...tested the drive with the manufacture's supplied utility repeatedly and it always tested fine, matter of fact, I still have the drive in another machine; I finally replaced the system board; my problem went away; so that's another suggestion. As a previous post mentioned, we don't know if you have IDE or SATA drives or both! or how old your system is; my problem m/b only had IDE channels. Good luck!
Second Hard Drive
by bvmk - 9/29/07 9:30 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had this exact same issue a while back with my Dell, - I had the dell tech reps baffled for quite a while, then some smart guy discovered that the dell needed the jumpers to be set as CABLE SELECT and the drives installed physically in the MASTER and SLAVE positions on the ribbon cable. The cable wasn't labeled but the Dell always wanted the master at the end of the cable and the slave on the mid-cable connection. Once I changed the set up to this the issue went away.
For backups...
by Zorched - 9/29/07 10:11 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
You're better off placing that drive in an external enclosure that runs on USB2.0.
Placing a drive that you're only going to use for backups into a machine and running it all the time will shorten it's lifespan, which is unnecessary if you're only reading/writing to it once a day/week. An empty enclosure will run you about 30 bucks and you should get one with a power switch on the back panel. When you're not using it, deactivate it using the "safely remove hardware" tool icon in the system tray, then turn it off to save wear on the drive. Installing a drive in one is the same as putting one in your PC: set the jumper to master, or standalone if it has the setting, plug the cables in, mount the drive in the chassis, close up the case, plug it in and go.
Once a drive passes the three year old mark of semi continuous (average) use it's chance of failure goes up dramatically. Seagate has just recently extended their warranty to five if I remember correctly, but for a long time, the average warranty you could get on a drive was two years. They never warranty something if they know they're going to lose money on it. If you're poking around inside with the drive, check the warranty on the label. If it's less than a 3 year warranty, you might want to consider getting a new drive. Backups are too precious to risk the loss on an aged drive.
If you're dead-set on keeping it in-chassis, then read on, otherwise ignore the rest. I'm assuming since you mentioned master/slave that the drive is PATA, or Parallel ATA. They use a ribbon cable instead of a thinner and newer serial-ata cable. I'm also assuming that while you said "aren't afraid to go inside the case" you might not be familiar with all that's in there. Bear with me, I'm not trying to demean you, just assuming you're not familiar and letting you take what you need from it.
As for why it can't be seen... well... Ironically UDMA cables are all 'supposed' to be automatically wired for cable select mode, hence the color-coding or labeling of the connectors. Blue goes to the motherboard, black (the far other end from the blue end) goes to the master drive and gray (the middle connector on the cable) goes to the slave. The cables are 'keyed' so they should only be able to go in one way. If for some reason yours aren't keyed then the striped side of the cable is pin 1, which historically is the side of the connector nearest the power connector. The jumpers on the drives are 'supposed' to be set for cable select. A UDMA cable has 80 conductors instead of the old 40. Compare it to the old cable just to see. If the old one looks like a wider version of the floppy cable, then it's the 40-pin style. The 80 pin cables look much more of a fine texture. The lack of color coding and/or labeling of the connectors might be the biggest tip off though, since the 40 pins cables had neither. It might be that the drive was at the very edge of the tech curve and doesn't support the higher UDMA modes but I doubt it.
The reason I had quoted 'supposed' above is that historically the cable select feature and XP have acted... unusual... for me. I generally set the jumpers on the drive and still use the UDMA cable. Just make sure that the jumpers and the cable position match, i.e. master jumpered drive on the black connector, etc. They seem to work better that way for me. Maybe it's karma, who knows. I haven't tried setting the jumpers opposite to their cable positions, and I'm not sure I want to, so I can't describe what will happen if you do.
If you have a newer computer that uses serial-ata (The thin red cables) and you're plugging this thing in on the same cable as a CD or DVD ROM drive, then try to make the hard drive is the master on that chain/controller as some hard drives don't play well with non-hard drives on the same controller.
From a troubleshooting standpoint other than what's mentioned above, pull the cable and make sure you didn't accidentally bend one of the pins on the back of the drive. You could have bent a ground pin that is intermittently touching a signal pin, but I doubt it. If you did, use a fine needle nose pliers to CAREFULLY straighten and align the pin again. If you bend it a second time there's a pretty good chance that if you didn't break it straightening it before, you will now. Game over for that drive. If no pins are bent, check to make sure that the where the connector meets the cable is pressed together firmly and that the cable is seated well in the drive. It's very possible that you have a intermittent connection on the cable. Try a new one, since I have had notoriously bad luck with the 80-pin cables due to the tiny wire size involved in making them.
When the drive disappears, check 'computer management' under control panel--> administrative tools. On the left side of that window, near the bottom of the list should be disk management. See if the drive is visible there. Make sure though that all your external drives that you may have are turned off at this point so you don't confuse them with the one that should be there inside the chassis. It should have a graphical representation of all your drives and partitions laid out. If your drive is listed there, check the left margin of the graphical pane and see if the drive is listed as "Inactive". If it is, right click the drive name i.e. disk1 and select activate drive. Do NOT click on a partition and select "Make partition active". Doing so may render your computer un-bootable since the purpose of that is to set the partition your computer boots from.
Since you said that you simply reformatted it from the last computer, I suspect that you didn't go into the computer management and delete/recreate the partitions, instead you right clicked the drive under "My computer" and selected "format". You may want to try, if there's not any critical data on there yet, trashing all the partition(s) on the drive and recreating one large one. Do NOT under ANY circumstances mess around with the drive that is labeled C:, generally labeled 'disk 0', unless you want to re-install windows and lose all your data. I have had one drive, once, that was quirky when I didn't get rid of the old partitions before reformatting it when I gave it to my brother. It suspect had something to do with how Microsoft wrote out computer ownership on the drive when it was formatted on the old computer, but I'll never be sure. Right click on the individual partitions and select 'delete' to rid yourself of them. Again, please be sure to not wipe out your primary C: drive or any other drive you want to keep. Once you wipe the partition(s), create new one(s), again right clicking the now non-partitioned space and selecting "Create primary partition". Go through the wizard, selecting the defaults and using all the space for the one drive. Once partitioned, you can right click the new partition and select 'format'. Make sure to make it NTFS when you format it, as it is much more... hearty of a file system when it comes to system crashes and reboots.
Sorry it's so long, hope it helps.
Maxtor Drives are 3 years now
by waytron - 9/30/07 5:53 AM In reply to: For backups... by ZorchedI just purchased a bunch of Maxtor drives a few weeks ago and they have the Warranty at 3 years now. So who knows. Has anyone out there ever tried to collect on one of these drive warranties. In my case, I am usually replacing the drive in a 3-5 year old computer and the chances of the computer still being in use in another 3-5 years is very low. So I have not had the need to cash in on a drive warranty. Maybe one of you guys out there who builds custom machines has had the experience.
Maxtor Drives
by gclifton - 10/1/07 10:08 AM In reply to: Maxtor Drives are 3 years now by waytronI just received my replacement drive from Seagate (they own Maxtor now). It worked pretty smoothly. Sent in my failed Maxtor 120GB and got another one a couple weeks later. Could have done a cross-ship but they didn't have any 120GB drives on hand at the time.
There's a place on their site that you can check the warranty status of your drive by serial number, etc. www.seagate.com
Bad news - I hope not
by peter4012 - 9/30/07 12:15 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Unfortunatelly, the last time I had a similar problem, my hard drive was having internal bios problem and ultimatelly became un-usable, luckily I managed to use one of it magical appearance show times to back the darn thing up and survived it's failure.
I also had a similar problem long ago with the HD controler acting up - unfortunatelly I had to learn the back up lesson the hard way - it actually ended up scambeling the drive and cost $ to recover.
There are too many possibilities, and hopefully you'll find one that works - but the easiest may be to back it up (please) and get another drive and see what happens (they're cheap now a days)
Doublt letter asingment (usually automatic, slave/master settings - usually don't do the magic act)
Good luck
Drive issue
by gclifton - 9/30/07 10:36 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
A few thoughts from 20-odd years of PC work. I've ran into similar issues a few times. Many have already been addressed by other posters. I'm not familiar with the EMachines.
1. Are both drives from the same manufacturers? I've had a few issues when drives are from different manufacturers.
2. Are both drives the same speed? 5400 vs 7200.
3. Are you using a 40 wire or 80 wire cable? Probably the easiest fix.
4. Check the jumpers on the drives Master and Slave or cable select. I use CS mostly. Except I've seen some older drives not work properly with this.
5. Check the BIOS settings. Typically I set the BIOS to Auto.
6. If you have Maxtor or Seagate drives both sites have some good diagnostic software for your hard drives. Not sure about other manufacturers but they probably have similar software.
Hope this helps.
Peek A Boo Hard drive
by hubcaps1 - 9/30/07 11:53 AM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Wendy, With all the Pro's out there giving advice. My solution has been fool proof for me.Just go to control panel/computer management then disk management.Find your new drive Then just make sure it is active then make it healthy. Reboot and see if everything is ok. Good luck,Roger.
peek A boo hard drive
by wendysweet - 9/30/07 5:35 PM In reply to: Peek A Boo Hard drive by hubcaps1Sorry for the expression...''been there done that". I have tried almost everything everyone has posted on.
I am going for the USB cord and going to use it as an external drive.I think that is my best bet at this point.
Wendy
computer & hard drive brand
by obiwan824 - 9/30/07 6:31 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
hi. if your havin this problem it could because of your hard drive brand. maxtor and some other off-brand hard drives(quantum fireball,etc.) have issues and are crappy. also e-machines pcs (pre-buyout by gateway) sometimes arent very good either. i had one i worked on and it had many issues. so if you havent fixed your problem that might be it. if u have that's good.
Just something to try
by travelinrob - 9/30/07 6:38 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Assuming you made the new hard drive a slave to the original, maybe try making it a slave to the CD/DVD drive instead.
Rob
Got scammed on eBay?
by spacepirate1 - 9/30/07 8:19 PM In reply to: My second hard drive is doing the peek-a-boo thing by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The only way to take any recourse in these matters is to use PayPal or any other online payment system and pay with a credit card. Why? Because, you only need to go to your bank and tell them what happened. Then, request a CHARGE BACK! Depending on the bank, you might have to sign a letter or a form swearing that what you are saying is true. Sometimes they'll just process the charge back over the phone. No matter what, you can do this pretty easily. If you've paid using your debit card, then you'll have to sit down with a bank clerk, explain your situation, and try your best to convince them to reverse your debit card transaction. PayPal, in this instance, will not be happy, especially if they cannot take any recourse against seller and end up eating the $200 bucks. The bottom line here is that you have the right to take recourse, by any legal means necessary. PayPal and eBay hardly ever help buyers who get screwed. They try and wipe their hands clean by saying that they cannot take responsibility for other peoples' actions. If they don't like it, tell them to fly a kite!
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