TR Forums

I'm running into an issue that's got me a bit stymied. Some times when I reboot my system my drives go missing (three HD drives and DVD burner.) About the only way I can get them to show up again in the BIOS is to power down and remove the power cable for a short while. When the system is up everything works fine so I'm not sure what to look at. I've tried going back to default settings in the BIOS thinking that might be an issue but that doesn't help. I've also run the numbers on various power calculators and my PSU has about 60-100 watts extra depending on which calculator you look at. (It's also a decent calculator since it is an Enermax.)

Any ideas as to what I should look at?

Some additional information. It seems like something is going on with the new CD burner that I have. It was working fine when I was running XP, but I just upgraded to Win8 a week ago. Now the drive isn't showing up in Win 8 (even though it does show up in the BIOS.) I even brought up the Device Manager and it isn't showing up on the ATA channel 0 where it should be even though the HD SATA drive is showing up, as do the other two SATA drives on ATA Channel 1.

(Not sure that it matters but this is a Gigabytes P31-ES3G MB with a E5200 and 4GB of RAM. I'm currently running a new 650TI video card, but I had seen the issue with the 4670 I had before.)

If I'm reading this correctly, your non-system drives (3 SATA and 1 IDE) are not showing up in Windows. Is this correct?

sorry for not being clear. All 4 drives are SATA. Two SATA HD on one channel (shows up as one IDE channel) and the other SATA HD and SATA DVD burner are on the other channel.

What happens if you boot without the DVD Burner connected?

Yea, disconnect your DVD drive, see what happens... Also, maybe try updating the BIOS on your motherboard (although it probably won't help since last update was years ago) or maybe try updating Intel's chipset drivers (Win8 should be good at finding right chipset drivers by itself, though)... Maybe re-check all SATA cables, make sure they are connected firmly.

Sounds like a PSU problem to me. Keep in mind that disk drives can draw a lot more power when they first spin up; if the PSU is on the edge, you may have problems on initial power-up.

Okay, I got a new PSU and the problem still exists. I probably needed to get a new one anyway as my old one was probably about ten years old. Now I have a Seasonic S12II 430W so there shouldn't be an issue with a simple DVD burner not showing it. It's kind of weird because it does show up if I go into the BIOS, but when it switches from the initial bootup BIOS display to the second screen where it shows the final hardware the DVD burner doesn't show up and it doesn't show up in Windows. I also went through and swapped the SATA cables between one of my HDs and the DVD burner. The HD continued to show up in Windows but not the burner.

It's making me wonder if something happened with the DVD burner. It's a new burner that worked fine for a a month or so before it started giving me these problems. I'm not sure how to test a DVD burner as I'm not aware of any utilities to test their fitness the way you test hard drives.

The drive is still coming and going. It is showing up in the BIOS now but sometimes it doesn't show up in the OS. It usually takes a shutdown and disconnect of the power cable to get the drive to show up again. Once the drive shows up it works fine as I can write to and read from the drive.

Have you tried deleting the upper and or lower filters for the drive?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

So the hard drives show up consistently after the PSU swap, the problem now is just the DVD burner?

Maybe this DVD drive is just really sensitive to voltage fluctuations on power up. If possible, move it to its own PSU connector string (i.e. make sure it isn't sharing with any of the hard drives).

Sounds like your sata ports are running in IDE mode instead of ACHI in the bios/uefi which might make a difference..theoretically it shouldn't matter for drive detection but ACHI has performance benefits anyway. It makes sense since you mentioned you upgraded from winxp which doesn't support ACHI. Did you do an in-place upgrade or clean install?

Either way you can't just switch IDE to ACHI without reinstalling win8 or trying some convoluted registry work around. But I would take the opportunity to reinstall a clean win8 copy anyway if you did an in-place upgrade. It could be something in the upgrade process that makes your drives randomly disappear. FYI even an upgrade copy of win8 will allow you to install a fresh clean copy.