HDD No Longer Showing Up in Disk Manager

[ZombieBacon]

2 days ago I feel asleep with my PC on like any other week.  Once I awoke, I went to itunes to listen to some to some podcast on itunes, only to find that my storage drives were missing!! Dun dun dun! too spooky does not want D; Luckily after a few restarts it showed up again for me to back up songs and photos.  I ended up falling asleep on my PC again to find the drive missing, whit no luck of showing up after turning the pc/restart. 

 

The storage Drive is a Seagate Barracuda 1tb.  It still shows up in bios,  Some times It'll show up on the initializing splash screen, but not on My Computer/Disk Management.  My boot up speed varies now. 

 

PC blued screened for the first time. It so happened I was watching the WAN show.  So not sure if Linus, but Linus

 

So far I've:

Restarted my PC many times

Swapped the sata ports/cords

Swapped the power cords

(edit 2/3/04) Connecting it to other PCs via sata to USB controller

formatting

new sata cables

[elecxonica]

Take a look in disk management (control panel, system and security, create and format hard disk partitions) and see if it shows up in there.

 

Never mind, i just reread the title.

[Vitalius]

Try it on a different PC. 

Download Speedfan and/or Crystal Disk Info and see if they see it. They probably won't if it's not showing up in the Disk Manager, but it's a shot in the dark. It might work. 

If nothing sees it still, you might be SOL.

[ZombieBacon]

Take a look in disk management (control panel, system and security, create and format hard disk partitions) and see if it shows up in there.

 

Never mind, i just reread the title.

 

Turned my PC on this morning, and the storage drive showed up in Disk management.  Went to format it and about 15 - 30 mins later (dismount sound) I check and sure enough it was gone.  Took a break, and said "Before I try and barrow a family members laptop; why don't I reinstall the sata drivers?"  So far it's been about 2 hours and it's still there.  I'll keep an eye on it, and post later if it seems to be fixed 

[ZombieBacon]

NOPE!  So I grabbed my family members laptops, and a Sata to USB controller.  No luck, was unable to get them to see it.   I kinda suspect my sata to USB controller I used is dead.  However I'm unable to test this theory as I've seem to of misplaced it... 

Was eventually able to format the drive on my PC, and found some still wrapped Sata cables in the motherboard box.  All to no avail.  

 

Looks like it's just a dying drive, Oh well.  Thanks for your help everybody (not sure if i should mark this as solved)

[DJzrule]

That is 100% taletell signs of a dying HD. You trying all of that instead of taking the opportunity to try and back it up immediately only made it worse.

 

Think of driving a car with a flat tire for an extended period of time; just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Hard drives can fail at a moments notice, or show some signs of degrading. Between random BSOD, weird boot times, and the drive mounting randomly, those are 3 ways to warn you to backup your stuff when you can.

 

I highly recommend using something like Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Utility. It works on any kind of SATA/IDE drive from any brand, and a quick test (SMART) and an extended test will tell you the true health of the drive.