Alright, a question for the PC gurus here. As you can see in the title, my 2nd hard drive is not showing.

Info

Computer (Compaq) bought in 2005. 2nd hard drive has been installed since day 1. It has worked just fine ever since day 1 until not too long ago. No system changes have been made except pulling the overheated gfx card and going back to the onboard gfx chip.

The problem: When we have a power outage, which is pretty common with the wind and all the trees we have, the computer boots itself back up when power is restored (I thought this was disabled actually...) Upon the computer booting up, the 2nd hard drive is no longer showing anywhere in the system. I restart, completely shutdown and reboot, and do many combinations of those to get the drive back. I have to do many of these restarts or shutdown and reboots and eventually the drive finally shows and all is well. It's a pain though as it takes about 10-15 minutes for the computer to boot. That means sometimes it is well over an hour process to get the drive back with constant booting and restarting until I see it again.

Any ideas? I have to do a reboot now to try to get it back and I'll jump into bios and disable the "restart on powerloss" thing for now.

I think it is all done on purpose to piss me off. It seems that any time I want to do anything with photography, earlier that day there was a power outage and the drive is missing. I can go for weeks just fine, but the time I want to play with photography stuff, it's gone, hehe.

put copies of any important stuff on your C: drive

Get an UPS (definition) to be able to have power to shut down the PC. Dunno about the hard-drive, maybe something in BIOS not good?

Quote from Luke.S :

put copies of any important stuff on your C: drive

That's one of the most stupid things i've heard in a while.
You should always put files on a 2nd partition/harddisk, so if your system goes nanners, you can still access the 2nd partition and all your data.

Mike, i suggest to make backup copies (best would be a new harddisk, or an external one) of your files as soon as possible. Sounds like your 2nd disk is going to quit working sooner or later. You'll most likely regret it if you wait too long.

Quote from mrodgers :

When we have a power outage, which is pretty common with the wind and all the trees we have, the computer boots itself back up when power is restored (I thought this was disabled actually...) Upon the computer booting up, the 2nd hard drive is no longer showing anywhere in the system. I restart, completely shutdown and reboot, and do many combinations of those to get the drive back. I have to do many of these restarts or shutdown and reboots and eventually the drive finally shows and all is well. It's a pain though as it takes about 10-15 minutes for the computer to boot. That means sometimes it is well over an hour process to get the drive back with constant booting and restarting until I see it again.

could be that the drive is dying, or it could be that the power supply isn't providing enough power at post, which prevents the drive from being seen by the bios.

Lol, didnt read all the text but ...

... Yesterday my HDD stopped showing too. Its my backup hdd on sata. Funny, but it works now. Sorry for offtopic trolling

Quote from jibber :

That's one of the most stupid things i've heard in a while.
You should always put files on a 2nd partition/harddisk, so if your system goes nanners, you can still access the 2nd partition and all your data.

Mike, i suggest to make backup copies (best would be a new harddisk, or an external one) of your files as soon as possible. Sounds like your 2nd disk is going to quit working sooner or later. You'll most likely regret it if you wait too long.

and your reply to my post it idiotic. It is his SECOND HARD DRIVE which isn't working genious

Back in 2005, SATA cables sucked. They didn't have "locking" connectors and were prone to slip slightly over time, caused by the vibration of the computer's fans. This often resulted in contact surface oxidisation and this in turn led to sporadic drive performance, even drive detection.

Open the side of your case, remove the SATA cable connectors and re-connect them - both ends. Repeat a few times, to score the surface of the connectors. Start up the machine. If it boots properly, replace the side of the case.

why don't you go grow up.

Children, please!

Quote from SamH :

Open the side of your case....

So, should I put the cover back on the case before attempting to open it again?

I don't think the cover has been on in years. Actually, I don't even know where the cover is to be honest.

Funny thing is, in bios on the "power restore restart" option, it is set to "off" yet still restarts on power restore.

Haven't gotten the drive showing yet on a handful of shutdown/reboot and restarts yet. I will give the "pull the cables and reinstall" a try. Though, I can't remember if it was the original cable or one I put in when I put the drive in.

Quote from mrodgers :

So, should I put the cover back on the case before attempting to open it again?

hehe! I ran my PCs without sides for years! This is the first machine I've ever run for more than a week, enclosed. Feels good, actually.. though a little scary. Had a lot of heat issues in my formative PC-years

Quote from SamH :

hehe! I ran my PCs without sides for years! This is the first machine I've ever run for more than a week, enclosed. Feels good, actually.. though a little scary. Had a lot of heat issues in my formative PC-years

I've dealt with that, with a massive 230MM Fan on the side, it cools better with panel then without.

Quote from Bose321 :

I've dealt with that, with a massive 230MM Fan on the side, it cools better with panel then without.

You know most PCs cool better with a side panel than without.
It's something to do with airflow inside the case.

Yes, airflow in cases is much better with the sides on. That's why they have them. These design engineers don't get paid for nothin' y'know
The only time I've had issues with my 3rd hard drive (I run 3) is because of two things.

Firstly, an old dying PSU. Obviously as these age they put out less power, so one that was just enough 6 months ago is likely to be insufficient now.

And secondly, drivers. The stupid nVidia Forceware drivers (for the SATA) seemed to keep randomly uninstalling themselves. I'm not sure if this could be related to the power though - if it wasn't detecting the device it might've removed the drivers.

Quote from TagForce :

You know most PCs cool better with a side panel than without.
It's something to do with airflow inside the case.

Yeah. It also depends on the hardware. For example, my two 4850's with stock heatsink, blew out the air via the side, so against the side panel. So with the panel off, the whole became less hot.

Go to the hard drive manufacturers website , usually have some diagnostic tools.
for example
or
Lets you know lots about the drive

As Sam said, try re-connecting the drives cables, including the power connector, (make sure the PCs power cable isn't connected first !!).

If that doesn't sort out the problem, you can try the following to try and diagnose the problem:

1. Swap the cables between the two drives. If you start having "no boot device found", (or any faults relating to the C: drive is not being found), issues then it's the cable that is at fault and you'll need to replace it.

2. If 1. isn't the issue, try swapping the SATA ports on the motherboard for the two machines. If you start getting issues with the C: drive, (as above), then you have a fault on your motherboard relating to that SATA port.

3. If none of the above are the problem try swapping out the suspect drive to another PC, (use a cable from that machine), and see if it has the same issues. If it does then the drive is on it's way out, and you best get your data off it quickly before it finally fails for good.

I don't think it's PSU related as the power cables on the same output are paralleled so if one drive was having power issues so would the other most likely. However, you can try using another SATA power connector, (if one is available), just in case.

Slave and master thats all i know :P

Well, this is great fun.

Ok, I did get a message during boot that the drive is on its last legs. That's fine. I don't have room for everything on C:, but I at least got my photography stuff backed up on C:.

All is good, right? Nope!

I backed up some stuff onto C: as I said. That night, wifey gets on the computer, then gets me and says, "the computer rebooted and now all it does is continue to reboot over and over again..."

Now, I'm locked out of the computer all together. I have searched and found plenty of help for repairing Windows XP..... if you have the XP installation disk. Mine is a POS Compaq, no installation disk. All I can do is restore which formats and puts the computer to the way it was from the factory from a partition that holds the restore information.

Ok, no problem I thought. I have another computer that I can at least put the Compaq hard drive in and transfer the most important over to another drive. Nope again. The Compaq computer is SATA and the other computer is quite old (very old) and only has IDE.

My thoughts were I would like to get an external hard drive, but currently, I wouldn't be able to do anything as I don't think the computer at the command prompt would see USB. I was thinking about going with a hard drive enclosure that you supply an internal drive to connect to USB. That way, you could have a collection of internal drives and they would all connect through the enclosure thing. That is the way I would like to go. Unfortunately, my daughter had a bout with pneumonia and a few days in the hospital costs quite a bit, so there's no funds to purchase as I've been wanting to grab up an external drive for back up for quite some time. Gotta love paying for health care and still getting charged thousands...

What other options might I have with trying to recover stuff on the C: before reformatting? What is happening is I am telling my wife to quit with her celebrity gossip sites as she is getting hammered with viruses, but she gets home from work after I am asleep. This time, it just rebooted on her and now reboots as soon as it gets to the "Loading Windows XP" screen. Is there any programs I can run from the command prompt to scan the computer as that is the only point I can get to upon booting up.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If you can download the ISO and burn it to CD, then boot from the CD.
There's a variety of tools on the disk to use from that point.

^^ UBCD requires an XP disc to compile a live CD(AFAIK at least bartPE does).

mrodgers. Get your hands on a copy of Ubuntu, pop the disc in and choose to boot from cd. From here it's up to you in which way you want to recover the data, if you choose to run the live CD as a live user you will have access to all of your drives(unless HDD#2 is totaly screwed).

If you choose to install Ubuntu CHOOSE MANUAL partitioning and section off a small piece of the HDD to install too.

The latter is a pain as if you want to rid of ubuntu from the PC you(at least I have had) will get problems with the boot sector not totally clean of installations.

As I said, be carefull not to partition or format any part of the HDD that you know contains data to EXT3/2 as recovery may be impossible if you do.

No, UBCD is a downloadable ISO file which you simply use a CD burning program of your choice to burn to disk.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

You can try SystemRescueCD.
Or Hiren's BootCD. It has a mini WinXP you can boot into.

Quote from need :

No, UBCD is a downloadable ISO file which you simply use a CD burning program of your choice to burn to disk.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

ya, it's all takes too bloody long anyway.

just format C:\


is the same true for XP as is wista if you choose to boot from recovery partition there is options to run ASR and/or system restore?