Lost Hard Drive...

[SomeWhatLost]

ok, so I know I have a spare 750GB drive around here somewhere... just begging to be used for something... I just can't remember where I left it...
but that's not what this post is about...

so I am building a sage server with some parts I have laying around, not ideal, but good enough so far...
I am using for the 'base' a newish Dell with a C2D E7500, ~200GB hard drive (well, that is what's left after all Dell's hidden partitions... what they do that for?),and a 500GB HDD I found laying around for the recording drive...
and it is running Win7

the problem is that if it falls asleep, when it wakes up, the 500GB drive is gone... where did it go? Sage gets upset, for good reason, when it goes to write to a disk that isn't there anymore...
if you then do a reboot the drive comes back and all is well, until the next time it goes into standby...
is this some sort of fancy new fangled Win7 feature? is it a bad HDD? some goofy SATA feature DELL came up with?
should I just stop letting the PC go into standby? or would that just be covering up the problem?

anyone know where I put that 750GB? it might be good to swap it with the 500GB just to see if the disappearing thing follows the drive... but then again, swapping out a HDD that Logically disappears, with one that Physically disappears may not be such a good plan either...

any suggestions on what to do, or where to look?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

ok, so I know I have a spare 750GB drive around here somewhere... just begging to be used for something... I just can't remember where I left it...

...(well, that is what's left after all Dell's hidden partitions... what they do that for?)

Well, I'd say because it's even easier to lose a recovery CD than it is to lose a Hard drive installed in the system... just saying...

[SomeWhatLost]

that makes sense... but they give you a recovery CD too...

but more important, why does my HDD go missing... or where does it go during standby?

[SomeWhatLost]

woo hoo... found the 750GB drive... was hiding in the basement by the Sonos controller... not sure what it was doing there...
but swapped it out, currently it is still formatting... so no clue if it does the same disappearing act as the 500GB yet...

[robogeek]

Some SATA drives take a little too long to come back online after a resume and cause a timeout failure in the AHCI SATA driver. I would check for updated drivers for that Dell machine and there is also a Windows Hotfix available to address this that might work for you as well. You can read more about the issue and find the hotfix link at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/15...r-sleep-resume