Game storage drive inexplicably disappearing from File Explorer and Device Manager

[Budgetclocker]

Hello, all. My current rig at home has an old Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive as a game storage drive, but I'm having a problem where the hard drive itself is inexplicably disappearing from Windows FE and Device Manager for whatever reason. My guess is it's going into an idle sleep/power-off state, causing it to disappear from the directory.

 

The remedy I have found currently is by checking for new hardware changes in Device Manager. This causes the drive to come back up in both FE and DM.

 

Is there any more permanent solution to this problem other than leaving it in a constant power-on state? I'd prefer not to do that for the sake of longevity, but I will if there are no other options.

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

For reference: the hard drive model is a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008.

[HanZie82]

First of check the physical connections.

Then it would also be nice to have some more specs, as the harddrive is most likely not connected to air.

Are you able to read out the S.M.A.R.T. data?

[Budgetclocker]

On 5/16/2021 at 11:05 AM, HanZie82 said:

Are you able to read out the S.M.A.R.T. data?

Not sure exactly how to read S.M.A.R.T. data, as I've never actually heard about this before. I'm a bit of a newbie to this sort of problem.

 

As for physical conditions, I've reseated the SATA cable a couple of times to no effect. How exactly do you read S.M.A.R.T. data from a drive?

[PwnyTheTiger]

You need to download CrystalDiskInfo to check the S.M.A.R.T. status more extensively, but you can do a rudimentary check in a command prompt window. Hold the windows key and press R, type cmd in the box and hit enter, once the prompt comes up type wmic diskdrive get model,status and press enter. It will then pop up with each drive in the system and an "Ok" or "Pred Fail" if the drive is indeed going. Using CrystalDiskInfo, you'll have more details as to what's going on with the drive exactly, which if you do download, just take a screenshot of that screen and post it here.

[Budgetclocker]

Here is the screenshot from CrystalDiskInfo

 

[PwnyTheTiger]

Some of those numbers seem high and indicate that there is an issue, specifically with the Reported Uncorrectable Errors, and well a ton others here.. Since this is a secondary drive, could you run check disk on it? You'll have to run a command prompt in admin mode, which can be done by typing cmd in the windows search bar and clicking "run as administrator". The command is chkdsk but run it with the /r argument to automatically error-correct and check for physical issues. (Type chkdsk /r in command prompt)

 

Even if that doesn't report an error, I'd start backing up that drive and get a replacement. Alternatively and also; you could check the event viewer to see if Windows is reporting why the drive is suddenly disconnecting, type eventvwr in the run prompt box.

[Budgetclocker]

Got a strange result. Took just over an hour and fifteen minutes, and it found no real errors using chkdsk with the /r option enabled.

 

 

Not sure why it didn't find anything wrong.

[ndesign.ie]

This always indicates the drive is failing, the disk may have gotten a head crash.

Definitely time to replace as although "working", it will fail soon.

Listen to it when in operation, any stage a screech or click can be heard, time to replace.

It may still work for a while but not reliably

[Budgetclocker]

Yeah, it's definitely failing. I just checked and all of my steam games suddenly have disappeared.

 

Thanks for the help, I guess I'll just go shopping for hard drives now lol

[ndesign.ie]

I'd use clonezilla on expert with 0 repeat passes continue without error checking to clone to new drive then run chkdsk /f /r on new drive, to save redownloading everything

 

[PwnyTheTiger]

22 hours ago, Budgetclocker said:

Got a strange result. Took just over an hour and fifteen minutes, and it found no real errors using chkdsk with the /r option enabled

 

Not sure why it didn't find anything wrong.

Chkdsk won't see anything wrong if the drive just has a hardware failure and has been fine up until this point, it was more of a check to see if the file system was still intact so you could easily transfer the entire drive to another.

 

20 hours ago, Budgetclocker said:

Yeah, it's definitely failing. I just checked and all of my steam games suddenly have disappeared.

 

Thanks for the help, I guess I'll just go shopping for hard drives now lol

Be sure to mark this thread as solved if that's all.