Strange hard disk problem

[AAClayton]

Hey everyone, I've frequently found solutions to problems I have encountered here, so, belated thanks for all the past help. Anyways, here's one I haven't been able to solve.

My desktop has two hard drives connected via SATA, but without RAID configuration. For about two years everything worked just fine.

Just recently however, whenever I boot up the computer, windows is only activating my main drive ( C: ), while my other drive ( F: ) is detected by Windows, but not mapped.

Both drives are properly connected to the motherboard, and detected by BIOS. Device manager shows them both as working properly. Disk management shows my storage drive as being properly assigned to the ( F: ) path, everything "appears" to be working, it just doesn't show up.

Here's the kicker, if I disable and re-enable the drive in device manager it shows up just fine, and works perfectly, so there is clearly no hardware failure involved either. For some reason, the drive just isn't registering into Windows whenever I boot up the machine.

Since I have a workaround, its more of an annoyance than a critical issue, but I would still like to get rid of this hassle.

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

[Baudwalker]

Hi Andrew

I recently had a similar quandry.

Hard drive was there...next boot it was gone...this was a SLAVE IDE with a MASTER SATA.

I found a bios entry buried deep within the bios where one could set the WAIT TIME for the HDD to be recognised....being a speed phreak I set it for 5 seconds....trouble everywhere

Ended up having to set it as 30 seconds and just wait for the MB to come to grips with the world. That was an ASUS M/B but not sure of the model.

Anyway something to look for in case that is causing you the grief.

Good Luck

Baudy!!!

[AAClayton]

Thanks for the suggestion, I checked BIOS for any settings that might delay drive recognition, but didn't find anything helpful. Any other ideas, this is still just an annoyance I would rather not have to deal with every time I boot the machine.

[AAClayton]

hopeful bump...