Second storage invisible

[Stellar Ray]

Hi!

Everything was alright with HDD & SSD, with windows on both of them. Suddenly, windows in HDD didn't recognize SSD, and was invisible in the BIOS.

It happened like this, 

I signed out, then signed back in; after going through the picture password, there was an endless black screen. Restarted only to find out that the SSD was missing. It wasn't there in the device manager either.

Then, restarted windows, but was still invisible. 

 

The SSD booted fine without HDD connected. Then tried again from the windows on HDD with SSD, this time both devices were visible in the BIOS, but SSD couldn't be found from windows (forgot to check device manager this time). 

Went to BIOS again and booted from SSD; the HDD was recognized.

Then booted from HDD, and this time SSD was visible both on BIOS & Windows, and working fine.

 

Is this an indication of software failure or hardware?

FYI, this is a recent Windows preview build 18305.1003 .

[seagate_surfer]

I have seen problems similar to yours caused by the firmware, check if you have firmware updates available for both your SSD and your HDD.

[BecauseICanTBH]

Try flashing your BIOS with the latest version. Get it from your motherboard manufacturer's website.

[Stellar Ray]

On 1/16/2019 at 1:55 AM, seagate_surfer said:

I have seen problems similar to yours caused by the firmware, check if you have firmware updates available for both your SSD and your HDD.

There are no firmware update utility available in the WD website. However, techspot has WD Update Utility here's the link - https://www.techspot.com/drivers/driver/file/information/17204/ 

It says 'Your drive MUST be connected to your computer through the USB port to update the firmware'. Is that important?

On 1/16/2019 at 6:59 AM, BecauseICanTBH said:

Try flashing your BIOS with the latest version. Get it from your motherboard manufacturer's website.

Flashing BIOS is very risky for me for there could be power outage without forewarning. 

[seagate_surfer]

So I spent some time reviewing the WD literature about their units and I found this: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=7&s=

 

 

Basically, it tells us that internal storage devices don't have firmware updates. Then I was checking the steps to update external units: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/index.aspx?s=firmware&lang=en

 

And everything is pretty much the same for almost all units, some of them include in the interface one option to upgrade the firmware but it can be downloaded from the website as well. Don't get that utility because the manufacturer already offers different ways to do the upgrades. I am assuming that something got corrupted here because if a drive can be detected in BIOS it can and should be visible in Windows, the reasons why they don't show in Windows are because:

1. Don't have a letter assigned.

2. Defective hardware.

3. Is not even detected in BIOS.

4. The file system of partition is corrupted.

5. The drive is not initiated in disk management.

*Between some other. 

 

Run the following commands from CMD and let me know if anything changes:

1. SFC /SCANNOW

2. CHKDSK

Edited January 21, 2019 by seagate_surfer

[Stellar Ray]

1 hour ago, seagate_surfer said:

Run the following commands from CMD and let me know if anything changes:

1. SFC /SCANNOW

 2. CHKDSK

 

Okay, I downloaded the WD Universal Firmware Updater for Windows. Will update at suitable time.

[Stellar Ray]

Though it might be irrelevant, just failed to create New simple volume from unallocated space; new simple volume wizard converts unallocted space from basic disk to dynamic disk.

And then comes this - 

Never went through these complications before!

 

 

[seagate_surfer]

2 hours ago, Stellar Ray said:

Though it might be irrelevant, just failed to create New simple volume from unallocated space; new simple volume wizard converts unallocted space from basic disk to dynamic disk.

And then comes this - 

Never went through these complications before!

 

 

I see, most likely because of the partition table, most likely because it is already GPT and that will make every partition on the volume a dynamic volume and that's not bad by the way so feel free to continue but just save your important files before in case anything happens.  

[Stellar Ray]

12 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

I see, most likely because of the partition table, most likely because it is already GPT and that will make every partition on the volume a dynamic volume and that's not bad by the way so feel free to continue but just save your important files before in case anything happens.  

The operation for new simple volume stops right there. It remains unallocated. 

At first shrank one of the disk partition and created unallocated space; was trying to extend partition C with that.

 

At this point, if unallocated space is merged straight with partition C, using AOMIE partition Assistant, will the original disk partition lose data, the partition from which unallocated space came from?