So last night I “lost” one of my hard drives which I assume had been partitioned into 2 drives (a few years old). I was playing a game and suddenly I had a “application not responding” type error message which could not be terminated so I hard rebooted. Upon reboot the ‘d’ & ‘e’ drives were no longer there. I could not detect them in the BIOS either or on various suggested fixes I found online.
Luckily my OS is on a different drive. The laptop is 4.5 years old so I thought maybe there was a fault in the drive and was debating replacing it. I did try to remove it and check the connections but I don’t have the correct screwdriver on hand. I would have done that before replacing it.
Anyway I’ve been dicking around trying to reinstall OneDrive which was on ‘d’ and was no longer accessible. It didn’t seem to matter what I tried (reinstalling) it still kept coming up with a “location not available” error.
While I was researching this, I suddenly lost explorer altogether (black screen) and rebooted again. And suddenly ‘d’ and ‘e’ are back and accessible.
Should I be worried about this? I should add that I have had NO instability at all prior to this, funny noises etc. Could it be just an accessibility issue or is it a symptom of coming problems?
On a related note I now have 2 Steam applications installed; can I merge the games into one application somehow?
Thanks
Hard drive failing can manifest itself in the weirdest form in my experience.
A couple of years ago, I was randomly losing keyboard inputs. Then everything degraded until the computer was unusable. Not a single file related issue all that time, but after replacing it just to see what would happen, it turned out it was merely the hard drive failing.
I’d backup and change that drive before it forces me to jump through those hoops again, possibly with less return, if I were you.
You’re probably correct.
I have literally just noticed that if I run Steam from its original location, I am getting frequent little pauses. I had noticed this in the game I was playing all the time in the last few days before I lost the drive. I have been messaging the developer on Steam and also getting pauses when typing there. But not when I was running the game from the C drive. So probably further issues ahead.
Backup and replace. Don’t eff around with it, total data loss is not fun.
Yes Boss!
It’s the only way to be sure…
So I didn’t replace the hard drive - as noted above it does not have windows installed on it, only games, other than onedrive which I did move to the functioning drive.
While I have not used the hard drive since ( I reinstalled the games I was playing on the ssd), I haven’t noticed it not being available again since.
However today I have had several random reboots. There has been no trouble with the restarts but I don’t know why they occurred. I wasn’t at my laptop for all of them, but twice I just got a black screen. I could see and move the mouse cursor but everything other than the window I was in was gone. I did get an I/O error report once. I have also noticed a short series of clicking noises about 4 times during the day that I have never heard before.
I did chkdsk, troubleshooting & a memory diagnostic with no errors reported. Device Manager shows no errors.
That is about the extent of my computer knowledge - any ideas/suggestions gratefully received.
So following the demise of the HDD in August I got a new Samsung Evo SSD.
No issues at all. Until today…boom…no drive showing up in explorer or disk management. Just like before.
This seems odd…could this be a bigger issue? The other old original ssd is still going strong.
Is the drive enumerated in the BIOS? You could see if you can check the SMART status there. I could definitely imagine a fault exists with the specific SATA port of your secondary drive bay, and the SSD only lasted longer due to some inherent greater error tolerance. Might be worth putting the failed drives in a USB enclosure to see if they are actually non-functional.
Either way I’d probably suggest migrating the primary SSD to something large enough for you needs than risking another drive in the second slot.
Thanks Brad
Err the drive has magically reappeared at some point this evening; I just checked after reading your message & there it was.
If/when it happens again I will check the BIOS as you suggest. It does seem a bit strange and the laptop is getting on a bit (early 2014).
Luckily I only have gaming stuff on that drive, most of which probably has cloud saves. Anyway it’s not the end of the world if I lose it. But your second suggestion is a good one, as the primary drive is only 256GB so a tad small.
