Hard drive spook

StraightPipe

Golden Member
Feb 5, 2003
1,676
0
71
My fiance's PC is an old Gateway 400 Cely. It runs ok for a cely, but is often plagued with performance problem when dealing with basic tasks in windows. But today it gave me a spook. I'd added a second 6.4 Gb Maxtor to the box to keep all of our word documents on. She is an english major, so she has a lot of writing. Anyway today the mouse wasnt working after a fresh boot (although it had sat for several hours after the boot without being touched). I wasnt too concerned becasue it is on a KVM switch and they can act funny sometimes, so I simpy rebooted again and the mouse worked fine, but suddenly I realized that the Documents Hard Drive was missing. Windows had gone ahead and label the CD-RW drive with it's letter d: So i checked my other PC's and it wasnt showing on the network either. Another reboot and it was back! I quickly made a back up copy, and warned My fiance of the danger. Is this something we should worry about? I intend to run the disk utillity, Powermax, to see if it checks out ok, whould I still trust this drive? is this just s freak issue? could it be the mobo? I think the mouse problems was just that when it rebooted initially the KVM switch wasnt set to the old Celly (KVM's can really fvck with plug and play!)

Would you trust it?
 

NTB

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2001
5,179
0
0
Open the case and check the cables - maybe something's loose. It could have moved just enough to make a connection the second time you re-booted. I've seen this happen before; on one of my old computers I booted up one day to see that I had no CD drives. Opened the case and found out that some how the ATA cable had come loose.

Nate
 

zephyrprime

Diamond Member
Feb 18, 2001
7,512
2
81
Sounds like something is up. It might not necessarily be the HD but it probably is since that's the new component. Unfortunately, I find that powermax and utilities like it are useless. They can only detect a failure when it's completely obvious.
 

Redviffer

Senior member
Oct 30, 2002
830
0
0
Check all the cables, make sure they are firmly pressed in both at the drive and on the motherboard. I've had this show up after moving my PC from home to a LAN, drives wouldn't show up until I opened the case and checked all the cables. They all SEEMED like they were plugged in fully, but lo and behold, it booted up fine and showed all the drives fine after that, haven't had another problem with it either.

I regularly open up my cases and just take a can of air and clean out the dust bunnies, and as part of my preventative maintenance, I will make sure the cables are firmly pressed in. I do this about every 3-4 months. (Hey, NM is dusty, its the desert you know). :)