34 replies to this topic

[Denise_M1]

I appreciate all your help and consideration of the problem. I guess I'll wind up bring the pc to the repair shop in a few months. It'll be nice to have the problem resolved. Denise

[8210GUY]

Hope you get it sorted, and if you do find out the problem etc, if you wouldn't mind saying what it was, and what was done ? It's always good to know when something has been as elusive as this, it helps us (me especially) to stick it in the memory banks, incase a similar issue presents in the future, good luck anyway.

[Denise_M1]

Update: Last week, something went wrong with my pc. I was able to boot into Windows but I couldn't do anything. My mouse was free to move and click but I couldn't open any folders or programs. I tried using different cables and ports and connecting different power connectors but it didn't help. I wound up taking the pc to the repair shop. The tech was able to get all the hdds available. When I asked him how he did it, he was very vague, as if he didn't want to give away any secrets. He only told me that he removed some cookies and checked the OS hdd on another machine to make sure some sectors hadn't failed. Then he connected all the hdds and they showed up under My Computer and Disk Management. I think he did more than he said but I'm happy to have the hdds available again. Denise

Edited by Denise_M1, 30 April 2013 - 11:14 AM.

[8210GUY]

They must of done more than that, if it was that simple what we have gone through here would have sorted it, clearing cookies would have nothing to do with this, infections can cause lots of problems, but I couldn't say if they would be capable of this, I guess it's possible they just don't know what they did that worked, they could of just been going through the sorts of things we did, then suddenly got lucky, it can happen, may be worth a look at the BIOS settings, do NOT touch them, make sure you exit without saving to be safe, but have a look at what these are set as, if they are different to anything we tried then that may be the solution, but would be interesting to know.

But I suggest doing a FULL backup now, while it is working right, then if it is purely a setting that makes a difference, you will recover quickly should it ever happen again, but unless you continue to backup (incrementally), so it's constantly up to date, you will need to save all files created since the backup was created, but glad your working again now.

[Jimbo Bigbelly]

Hi, Denise

Sorry this is so late.  I'm pretty impressed with your debugging skills.  You should think about a position in I&T at Dell.Anyway, You probably replaced your drives and the problem disappeared.

If not, for the problematic drives, disable smart in bios (actually, since you're JABOD, you could disable smart for all the drives and it won't matter....regardless of smart enable/disable, you still need to run chkdisk every month or so.)

anyway, WD in their drives has a terrible implementation of smart.  one of the biggest limitations is as the drives get full and smart starts finding "bad" sectors, the drive may be reported as unusable, hence it disappears in Windows.  To check this out, leave smart enabled, and boot to DOS with everything turned off.  This won't load anything beyond the standard SCSI driver (regardless whether you have IDE, SATA, or even USB drives, they still run through the SCSI driver then filter drivers are added later to take care of additonal hardware features of the drives).

 

Type the letter of the problematic drive followed by a colon ( then enter.

 

The drive should appear.  You could run a "dir" to make sure you have the right drive, because you've been swapping a lot of stuff. 

 

Reboot and verify the problematic drive is gone in Windows.

 

Now reboot and enter CMOS setup.  for the problematic drive, disable SMART, then boot into windows.  The problematic drive should be present.

 

Here's a suggestion:  we all know Windows HDD support is poor at best because they have significant compatibility issues to work through and a long legacy of people writing OS who don't really understand what they're doing, especially since the brain drain happened in Redmond.  And, I'm presuming you're using this 8-disk monster as a media server, so you're likely streaming movies to another device, and the windows implementation of networking support is horrible as well.  To circumvent this, buy another cabinet, install Linux, set your drives as JABOD, and you will be amazed with the performance.  You can stream multiple HD movies across a 100Mbit net with not a glitch or blocky picture. 

 

Good Luck!