This might be a hardware problem; and, if so, I've posted in the wrong place again and offer my humblest apologies.
I have a Dell Dimension desktop 4700 of some age now. The system has 2 internal hard drives and 2 external hard drives. For reasons unknown to me, one of the external drives (g:) is present sometimes and not present at other times. All the other drives (c:, and i:) are present at all times. I have verified that the drive has power and is connected to a USB port. I've even changed ports and experienced the same result.
I think this must be a problem in WinXP-Pro SP-3 (fully updated), but I have not a clue what else to do to diagnose the problem. The drive is a very large capacity drive that I use for one of my backup destinations. It contains some files that I have in no other place and would like to be able to access it and save those files elsewhere.
TIA
Disappearing Hard Drive
-
BobH
- UraniumLounger
- Posts: 9266
- Joined: 13 Feb 2010, 01:27
- Location: Deep in the Heart of Texas
Disappearing Hard Drive
Bob's yer Uncle
Dell Intel Core i5 Laptop, 3570K,1.60 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 11 64-bit, LibreOffice,and other bits and bobs
| (1/2)(1+√5) |
-
Bigaldoc
- PlatinumLounger
- Posts: 3757
- Joined: 24 Jan 2010, 11:00
- Location: Lexington, KY, USA
Re: Disappearing Hard Drive
I've got my fingers crossed that you can get those files...
The closest I can come to your description is that I've had it happen to me with external USB drives, more than once, on a drive that eventually failed. In my case, the first signs of trouble was just as with yours - a drive that for some reason wasn't visible and on a reboot or at some later time it would be.
As the problem got worse, my XP system would take a LONG time to boot and I didn't know why. Eventually, I couldn't boot at all and started a process of elimination. By trial and error, I learned that the system booted fine if I disconnected all USB devices.
In the end I discovered the one bad USB drive. I don't know if this bears any resemblance to what you're experiencing but I hope you don't lose anything.
The closest I can come to your description is that I've had it happen to me with external USB drives, more than once, on a drive that eventually failed. In my case, the first signs of trouble was just as with yours - a drive that for some reason wasn't visible and on a reboot or at some later time it would be.
As the problem got worse, my XP system would take a LONG time to boot and I didn't know why. Eventually, I couldn't boot at all and started a process of elimination. By trial and error, I learned that the system booted fine if I disconnected all USB devices.
In the end I discovered the one bad USB drive. I don't know if this bears any resemblance to what you're experiencing but I hope you don't lose anything.