Windows 8.1 - Disk Manager can't find SATA HD

[Clunkclick]

My usually trouble free "Mediacenter" PC (Just a spare Asus AMD re-purposed) has started to play up.

 

First problem encountered today was that it couldn't find the internet. Windows wasn't detecting the RealTek Network Adapter and therefore wasn't loading the adapter software. Despite repeated re-booting the problem didn't go away.

 

On re-boot discovered that LEDs on network socket weren't operating, so suspicion fell on the BIOS. Checked the BIOS set-up values and the network adapter was already set to load at boot. Despite this indication I reset the BIOS to default values and re-booted a couple of times. This didn't turn the network socket LEDs on. So, on the assumption that the BIOS NVR values might be corrupted I popped the disc battery on the mainboard (With the power off !), shorted out the NVR contacts, waited 10 minutes and then re-inserted the battery and re -booted.

 

Joy ! All fixed in the networking department.

 

However, the joy was short-lived, as the board is now refusing to access the 500GB  SATA HD  Seagate (Installed as a second drive to an 250GB SSD( Adata)).

 

A shed load of connection checking and swapping and re-booting on hasn't resolved it. The current situation is that whilst the  Windows 8.1's  Device Manager detects the SATA HD,  when I attempt to populate the drive using the button on the "Volume" tab, it fails with "Can't find volume"  error message. Further, Disk manager can't see it, so you can't see if their is a volume there or, come to that, create a new one. And obviously, File explorer can't see a volume.

 

Edit: And Seagates own "SeaTools", latest edition can't detect the disk either.

Edit 2: I should have also said that the Asus MB BIOS  detects the Seagate HD, but doesn't include it as an item in the "Boot priority list" ????

 

Any suggestions gratefully received.

 

Nick

Edited 10 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[io1901]

Drive dead? Have you tried it in another pc? Changed the sata cable? PSU starting to fail that can sometimes give some funny errors?

[Clunkclick]

I've replaced the button battery on the MB as that was showing only 10% on the tester - hence NVR corruption ?

 

Drive is spinning-up alright, perhaps too well, as its making a bit of a roar.

 

I had a good look at the top-side of the MB using a bright light couldn't see any blown caps, burnt resistors or cracks, but there's no substitute for pulling that out and looking at both sides.

 

Per your suggestions, I'll try another cable/ the disk in another machine tomorrow.

 

 

N

Edited 11 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[GentleGiant]

If it is a dual BIOS machine, you might have to reset both chips, heard of similar issues in the past.

 

Also heard one rumour that the botched M$ update that is knocking loads of people offline has caused a BIOS corruption. If I can recall where I read it, I will go and see if there have been any updates to that story.

 

And you all laughed at me for refusing a free "upgrade" to Windows 10.

[@Lee]

He's running 8.1 :dull:

[Clunkclick]

He's running 8.1 :dull:

And . . . 

 

N

[Clunkclick]

MB not dual BIOS - 2010 Asus M4A88TD-M EVO  board, set-up with W8.1 in 2013.

 

"Repairing" system from the Windows 8.1 disk non-feasible as, at best, all apps installed  from disk or downloaded onto the partnering SSD will be eliminated.

 

Out of 4 disk partitioning/file recovery tools (Paragon, Stellar, Acronis & Minitool) only Minitool detects the disk, but can't do anything else but tell me there are a few "Raw" files on it. I did earlier in the year set-up a virtual Hard disk on the SSD, with data zone on the HDD. I thought I had performed all the necessary actions to remove all that and there's no .vhd file left on the SSD.

 

Just hoping its not a mean hard disk virus, in which case, its not advisable to run it in another machine, that is without having already populated the entire disk with zeros.

 

In any event, I think what I'll have to do is disconnect the SSD and then start then system with the Windows 8.1 CD and then blitz the HDD with the repair tool or simply lay down a new installation of windows on the HDD in isolation . . and when that is up and running, low-level format the whole thing.

 

N

Edited 11 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[GentleGiant]

Sorry, I should have been clearer, the M$ update bug currently buggering up peoples computers at random affects WIn8/8.1 and Win10.

 

 

EDIT

 

Asus M4A88TD-M EVO

 

 

 

I had the same board, I ditched it earlier this year after it starting playing up and not recognising SATA drives; it turned out one of the SATA channels was dying - and took out the attached SSD with it when it finally went, about a fortnight later

Edited 11 December, 2016 by GentleGiant

[Clunkclick]

Sorry, I should have been clearer, the M$ update bug currently buggering up peoples computers at random affects WIn8/8.1 and Win10.

 

 

EDIT

 

Asus M4A88TD-M EVO

 

 

 

I had the same board, I ditched it earlier this year after it starting playing up and not recognising SATA drives; it turned out one of the SATA channels was dying - and took out the attached SSD with it when it finally went, about a fortnight later

Asus MB info not comforting. Mines only 6.5 year's old.

 

As to the HD (A Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500GB) , it is a bit older than the board (As it was used with XP), but it still appears to be spinning up OK, isn't overheating and appears to be recognised by all sections in the BIOS, when plugged in to either SATA  port 1 or 2 (Rated @ 6 GBps) on the MB 

 

To date I've removed the hard disk (Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500GB) from the 'puter and cleaned it up, especially the circuitry on the downside, which was full of dust; Removed a jumper which was restricting the rated 3GBps speed to 1.5GBps (A relic of when it was running XP), flashed the BIOS ROM with a new file (BIOS file 1801 -the last update issued (2012)) taken from the official Asus UK web site, reset the disk comms protocol in the BIOS from IDE to AHCI and switched off the on-board IDE controller.

 

Re-installing the HD, I've booted from an ISO copy of W10 (Home) with the intention, if all works, to create a two boot system. 

 

On re-boot the system was considerably faster, and, as before the BIOS recognised the HDD to full value - 500GB.But this time, going through the W10 Command line option in the "Repair" option enabled me to detect the disk in DISKPART, delete an existing partition and then fill the disk with zeros using the "Clean All" function in DISKPART.

 

Suspiciously that's just finished zeroing everything after 25 minutes, rather than 2.5 hours it should have taken, so I'm now going to have a look at what it has done.

 

As usual, I really don't know what I'm doing, but feeling my way, through trial and error seems to be yielding results.

 

N

Edited 11 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[camelspyyder]

Sorry cant be of genuine help, but I also have an ASUS + AMD MB / Seagate(Maxtor) HD combo and the same thing has happened 18 months back.

 

PC still sees Samsung ATA and Buffalo USB hard drives fine.

Edited 11 December, 2016 by camelspyyder

[GentleGiant]

Asus MB info not comforting. Mines only 6.5 year's old.

 

As to the HD (A Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500GB) , it is a bit older than the board (As it was used with XP), but it still appears to be spinning up OK, isn't overheating and appears to be recognised by all sections in the BIOS, when plugged in to either SATA  port 1 or 2 (Rated @ 6 GBps) on the MB 

 

To date I've removed the hard disk (Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500GB) from the 'puter and cleaned it up, especially the circuitry on the downside, which was full of dust; Removed a jumper which was restricting the rated 3GBps speed to 1.5GBps (A relic of when it was running XP), flashed the BIOS ROM with a new file (BIOS file 1801 -the last update issued (2012)) taken from the official Asus UK web site, reset the disk comms protocol in the BIOS from IDE to AHCI and switched off the on-board IDE controller.

 

Re-installing the HD, I've booted from an ISO copy of W10 (Home) with the intention, if all works, to create a two boot system. 

 

On re-boot the system was considerably faster, and, as before the BIOS recognised the HDD to full value - 500GB.But this time, going through the W10 Command line option in the "Repair" option enabled me to detect the disk in DISKPART, delete an existing partition and then fill the disk with zeros using the "Clean All" function in DISKPART.

 

Suspiciously that's just finished zeroing everything after 25 minutes, rather than 2.5 hours it should have taken, so I'm now going to have a look at what it has done.

 

As usual, I really don't know what I'm doing, but feeling my way, through trial and error seems to be yielding results.

 

N

 

Mine was an ex review copy from when it was launched (2008??), but I have had issues with two other Asus boards falling apart in the last few years, so I am really wary about buying them; which is a pity, because they used to be rock solid.

 

I replaced it with a similar spec MSI board; because the MSI board came out later, it takes a better range of cpus and RAM, my current 1090T was the best chip the Asus board would support, but the MSI board takes the later FX chips as well, so I still have upgrade potential.

[Clunkclick]

Carrying on . . . successive attempts to install both Windows 10 (Home) or Windows 8.1 on the Seagate SATA HDD failed with the same error message - "Drive is not suitable to install O/S on" , whatever that means.

 

So, I gave up on that.

 

With the HDD disconnected, the system boots to the SSD without problem and as soon as I connect the HDD, the niggly problems occur - zeroing of some BIOS NVR values, boot stalling, MEM OK (Or not OK in this case) memory light flashing during boot.

 

So, primae facie looks like the HHD is faulty.

 

After a bit of messing around I managed to get DISKPART to install a primary partition of 100 GBs on the drive (The drive is specified as 500Gbs), although it was a bit shaky when doing it. After a few, hiccups it appears to be stable.

 

And Windows 8.1. Disk manager recognises it finally as a 100GB primary partition, but still, the BIOS sign-on screen says its 500GB (As its specified). And as before, its now shown as a drive in File Explorer, but Device Manager issues an error message that "Volume information cannot be found" when I click the "Populate" button on the "Volumes" tab.

 

CHKDSK reports the drive capacity as 100GB and says its fine, no read/write errors/bad sectors/clusters.

 

However, HDDscan (http://hddscan.com) reports that there are bad sectors earlier on in the LBS structure and that the average access time per sector is greater than 500ms i.e. all bad. And the read/write rate to the LBA entities varies between 1.6.-2.6 GBps, averaging 2.2 - slow or what ?

 

So I suspect that either the drive is damaged or there's a driver issue in Windows.

 

I've tried to locate new drivers - I take it that I'd need the chipset + disk driver,  but the disk supplied with the board won't load (Being designed for W7) and whilst the ASUS UK support website hosts an entry for the M4A88TD-M EVO board it now isn't populated with drivers.

 

The other possibility is that the disk is damaged. The prime culprit, I suspect would be dust getting into the internals as I had a disk cooling fan attached underneath the drive and the air pressure may have forced the dust inside. Won't have the lid off of that (Apparently, you don't need a clean room, as long as you don't spin it up with the lid off) until the possibilities of improving the situation with a driver refresh have been exhausted.

 

N

Edited 12 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[io1901]

(A Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500GB)

Personally for a drive like that - that you haven't any data on I'd responsibly recycle it (ie. bin it and buy a new one). It's not worth the messing about. As a 1TB drive isn't going to be more than £50.

edit:

If you disassemble it - the platters make good cup coasters. Just mind what you do with the magnets - they are quite strong.

Edited 12 December, 2016 by io1901

[Clunkclick]

Fixed. 

 

HDD problem.

 

Replaced GPT partition with MBR (Using the trial version of Acronis 2017) - now all's right with the World. Windows now detects Drive 2 as 465GB.

 

From my limited knowledge, wouldn't have thought that the BIOS would have had to be UEFI for GPT to work, after all, the BIOS was correctly reporting the HDD size and it was Windows 8.1 that wasn't. - I suppose when Windows loads the HDD changes reporting destination from BIOS to Windows.

 

Partitioned the HDD Primary + Extended, so now one  extra primary + logical drive.

 

Its probably time I migrated to W10 on this machine, so I'll be putting a copy of that on the primary and making the machine dual boot.

 

Question remains what took out the MBR ?  The VHD ? Virus ?

 

 

N

Edited 12 December, 2016 by Clunkclick

[io1901]

Fixed. 

 

HDD problem.

Wouldn't trust it as far as I could spit it.

[JohnMcL7]

Wouldn't trust it as far as I could spit it.

 

Agreed, hard drives can fail in many different ways and I've seen several hard drives that function intermittently for a while with odd little errors then just bite the bucket.  The moment I see any of that happening I just get rid of the drive as it's not worth the hassle.

 

With regards to UEFI and GPT, I believe you need UEFI to boot a GPT formatted drive but I didn't think it was needed if the GPT formatted drive was an additional one as my machine is set to legacy boot as it's using a 500GB SSD but works fine with the three GPT formatted hard drives I have,

[Clunkclick]

Agreed, hard drives can fail in many different ways and I've seen several hard drives that function intermittently for a while with odd little errors then just bite the bucket.  The moment I see any of that happening I just get rid of the drive as it's not worth the hassle.

 

With regards to UEFI and GPT, I believe you need UEFI to boot a GPT formatted drive but I didn't think it was needed if the GPT formatted drive was an additional one as my machine is set to legacy boot as it's using a 500GB SSD but works fine with the three GPT formatted hard drives I have,

In fact, the provenance of this HDD  fits the scenario you describe.

 

It was recovered from another UEFI based machine where it had been used as the primary disk. So, it was probably, although I can't recall definitely, partitioned as GPT by Windiws 8.1. Its was then plonked in the current Non-UEFI Windows 8.1 machine as an extended partition. As the resident SSD is partioned MBR, then the extended oartition for the HDD was MBR. However, at a later date, I made it part of a virtual drive and perhaps it then was changed to GPT by Hyper-V or the associated software.

 

I can't remember exactly what I did (A good case for keeping a log !).

 

The situation now is that it appears to be mostly fine. I am able to populate the volume tab in its Device Manager entry with all the relevant data,  whereas I couldn't before. Its now running with Windiws 10 on a dual boot with the SSD which is running W8.1. All seems fine there.

 

The HDD is "Smart", and that has been tested under the new set-up - this couldn't be done with the darlier partitioning, whatever it was. All 202 entries in the latest "Smart" report show green lights, except one, no.199, Ultra DMA CRC Errors, which is yellow exclamation marked. So, possibly a memory error there.

 

Also, the cluster mapping and seek times that were showing "Bad" and in excess of 500 ms are now showing good, with the majority of seeks under 5ms - the spec for tbis HDD says seeks should average at about 8ms. Further, the data transfer rates are now nice and stable under test @ 70MBs.

 

There's nothing of any importance on it yet in terms of data, and anyway all mine is duplicated across several machines (Most of which are switched off at any given time) as well as clouded at multiple sites. I wonn't say it can't happen the chances of the "Asteroid" event is small.

 

N

[GentleGiant]

I'm glad to hear it isnt the board dying, mine was a great board and I was sad to throw it away.

[Clunkclick]

I'm glad to hear it isnt the board dying, mine was a great board and I was sad to throw it away.

Never say never.

 

The hard drive has got the DMA error showing all the time on the "Smart" report and CHKDSK /f doesn't fix it. And it doesn't sound right. But the error value is steady @ 200. Web sources are on the  side of the disk controller board on the HDD itself being at fault.

 

Thing is that I rarely use that machine for day-to-day purposes, so hopefully any future failure can be pushed to the right - my intention/hope was to replace the Asus MB as soon as the DDR4 boards go mass market.

 

N

[GentleGiant]

Never say never.

 

The hard drive has got the DMA error showing all the time on the "Smart" report and CHKDSK /f doesn't fix it. And it doesn't sound right. But the error value is steady @ 200. Web sources are on the  side of the disk controller board on the HDD itself being at fault.

 

Thing is that I rarely use that machine for day-to-day purposes, so hopefully any future failure can be pushed to the right - my intention/hope was to replace the Asus MB as soon as the DDR4 boards go mass market.

 

N

 

Rumour has it that the new boards will not be cheap, AMD going for higher prices for perceived value al la Apple?? I dont know.

 

They will have to substantially beat INTEL, because a pound gets you a penny, INTEL have plenty of extra performance in reserve, they just dont want to put it on the market until they have to.

[cheezemonkhai]

The high end AMD chips will be 8 (real and full) cores.

 

So yes it's going to cost more. Doesn't mean the 2 and 4 core options will be rubbish.

As for all that extra performance, don't be so sure, there are markets where they need it right now and it doesn't appear to be there.

 

Just because people say a company is playing games and has lots to spare, doesn't mean it is.

They very high end chips are there, they're just expensive and too expensive for home users.

Edited 16 December, 2016 by cheezemonkhai

[GentleGiant]

The high end AMD chips will be 8 (real and full) cores.

 

So yes it's going to cost more. Doesn't mean the 2 and 4 core options will be rubbish.

As for all that extra performance, don't be so sure, there are markets where they need it right now and it doesn't appear to be there.

 

Just because people say a company is playing games and has lots to spare, doesn't mean it is.

They very high end chips are there, they're just expensive and too expensive for home users.

 

8 cores may not be enough if they dont get the performance up and the power use down, and that means smaller fabs, and INTEL are waaaaaaaaay ahead of them there.

[cheezemonkhai]

8 cores may not be enough if they dont get the performance up and the power use down, and that means smaller fabs, and INTEL are waaaaaaaaay ahead of them there.

 

Erm... they've completely redesigned the cores, so they're not full SMT cores rather than the 2 integer, one FPU type bulldozer style cores.

A 4 core AMD only had half that many FPU, so the performance suffered.

 

The newer AMD stuff out 2017 will rectify that and if it's approx equal clock for clock (and currently showing slightly better power) then twice as many cores on a chip should be useful.

 

Also global foundries are not particularly behind intel in terms of the fab technology. Yes intel have loads of fabs and enough cutting edge ones, but it doesn't mean others don't too.

[GentleGiant]

Erm... they've completely redesigned the cores, so they're not full SMT cores rather than the 2 integer, one FPU type bulldozer style cores.

A 4 core AMD only had half that many FPU, so the performance suffered.

 

The newer AMD stuff out 2017 will rectify that and if it's approx equal clock for clock (and currently showing slightly better power) then twice as many cores on a chip should be useful.

 

Also global foundries are not particularly behind intel in terms of the fab technology. Yes intel have loads of fabs and enough cutting edge ones, but it doesn't mean others don't too.

 

As I said, I havent been following the promises. but they hyped and failed to meet expectations on the last two major launches, and as I said, they need to be WELL ahead of current INTEL offerings, because I can guarantee, as soon as they are close to being released, INTEL will launch something just as fast, if not faster.

 

As for double the cores, 8 isnt double, I own a 6 core AMD CPU, so it is only incremental.

 

Even clock speed isnt a good indicator, the chips works differently internally, so clock speed is only an indication, not proof. They also need to deal with the power requirements, speed for speed INTELs use far less power right now.

 

Another problem is, as they work differently, different speed tests will give different results, as will real life tests; I play Lord of the Rings Online, and I am not suffering single core overloads on my old 1090T the way many INTEL i7 users report, so the AMD chip handles the game better, even though it is much older and less powerful overall.

[VWD]

He's running 8.1 :dull:

And ?

I'm still running 7 ,but I don't get any updates that botch mine up I'm lucky to get any .