Tech Support Forum - Hard Drive Support

Vista & Win 7 Dual drive disk issue...

c0ldpr0xy — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:16:38 GMT

Brace yourself because this is going to be confusing:

OK so I made a new disk drive from unallocated memory (130gb) for Win 7 ultimate 64bit which I bought recently so now I have dual boot along with vista home premium 64bit. I have 3 disks, C (vista), D (data) and E (supposed to be win7). After I installed Win 7 on E drive, whenever I boot up Win 7, E turns into C... and when I boot with vista, its all normal again but booting up with win 7 makes C (vista) into D (vista) and makes D (data) into E (data)... is anyone with me?

So far I'm amazed there's been no program with any path conflicts yet...

HDD Noise - Question

willmington — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:09:59 GMT

Hi guys first time poster long time reader.

I have a USB external enclosure (Nexstar3) containing a Seagate ST3400832A 400GB 7200.8 ATA drive. I have had this unit for about six months and the drive has had maybe 20-30 hours use.

Recently, I noted an odd noise coming from the HDD. This noise occurs when the drive is inactive/idle. I know odd noises and HDD are bad bed fellows.

The noise pattern is very precise as I will detail below. Also this happens whether the drive is connected to a pc or not. I will list the time in a chronometer manner in mins and secs

Time 00:00 <--switch on external enclosure
Drive starts fine no issues.
Time 00:50
Drive begins to make low intensity of rapid continuous ticks about 7 and then a slightly louder click. This patterns continues ie loops and lasts for 1mn 10secs.
Time 02:00 the above noises stop and the drive can be heard to spin quietly (as per normal)
Time 08:00 noises restart same as above under 00:50
Time 09:10 noise stops after 1mn 10secs exactly as before.

The process then restarts again after 6 mins ie there are 6mins to this cycle after the first one.

So for clarity

00:00 switch on
00:50 noise starts
02:00 noise stops
08:00 noise starts
09:10 noise stops
15:10 noise starts

One final point, if I connect the external enclosure to a pc and wait for the noise to begin and then access the drive, the noise immediately stops and the drive is heard functioning normally.

Now fearing that my drive was about to fail I purchased a new HD. The replacement was identical ie ST3400832A. The first thing I did was just to power up the drive ie just connected it to a powered molex (one used for usb to ide/sata converter). Lo and behold, the new drive does exactly the same thing. Same noise, identical timing.

I did also run Seatools (long test) on the new drive and it passed with no issues.

The only plausible answers are that

1. This noise pattern is a feature of this drive model prior to failure

2. This noise pattern is somehow part of the normal operation of the drive. Though why it should be doing this is unknown to me.

In the first instance, I was wondering if anyone had run across this type of noise pattern before and could provide some clarity.

Many thanks for any info provided

Cheers

[SOLVED] SATA2 to SATA3 HD in a laptop

win98forever — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:00:31 GMT

I'm getting my new HD replaced because it failed. I just got an email from newegg indicating the drive they registered as receiving is a SATA3. My invoice says it's SATA2. All the other numbers match.

If they send me a SATA3 will it work in my laptop?

C: memory dissapearing!

PurpleSamurai — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:57:58 GMT

Hi, I am running an AMD Athlon with 512MB of RAM and 1.5GHz processor, and two hard drives, but one of them, the main one, C:, its memory keeps dissapearing! Now this has been happening for months but it keeps going off and on, my main drive i think is about 17GB max, its normal space free is usually around 5GB, which is fine for me, but one day it just started slowly dropping and im down to 40MB! I dont know what to do, i ran HijackThis and AVG, AVG found a bunch of stuff and got rid of them, Hijackthis however, i sent the log to their main site and they scanned it, they found some odd things there, those were removed, i googled them and they were viruses, but my memory is still dropping! Please help!

new external hard drive not working

TobolaRJ — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:40:36 GMT

I just purchased a new hard drive Western Digital Scorpio 160 gb 2.5" and a Sun Bright Classic 2.5" hdd enclosure, it comes up as new usb hard drive installed but when I go to my computer it is not showing up? It also does not show up when I am in Disk Management. Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi, from Suzanne Bedard-Davis

sdavis041552 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:02:44 GMT

drive d on my computer is almost full... when i pull it up to see what is on it, it tellls me "recovery"... how do i regain space on that drive D as I have just purchased my computer last month and will run out of space soon.

Thank you

Suzanne Davis

Win7 Vs Velociraptor

Vorax — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:05 GMT

Hello guys,

I'm running Windows 7, 64b (Last RC version)

I'm wondering why do I have a 5.9 score in the Windows Experience Index in the hard drive..

I mean, is not a bad score, but considering I have a WD Velociraptor (150gb) running it, I should have more in my opinion..

This is my system:

Motherboard: Asus P6T Deluxe V2
CPU: i7920 (2.66ghz not OC)
Mem: OCZ DDR3 PC3-15000 Reaper Low-Voltage Triple Channel (6ghz OC at 1866mhz)
Graphic Card: Asus ENGTX295
Sound: Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme
Disk Drives:WESTERN DIGITAL VELOCIRAPTOR 150GB SATA 16MB (IDE)
WESTERN DIGITAL 2x 500GB SATA II 16MB (raid 0)

All my other ratings are fine, 7.6 +, tho the disk I think is low and I want to know why..

Hope you guys can give some help/tips

My external hard drive gone blank, I need help...

kenshin84 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:12:33 GMT

Hello, I'm new here. I'm not quite good in computer stuffs.

I have a 500g hard drive, FAT32. Spaces used around 250g.
Everything just happen to sudden, so I don't quite remember the details.
I'm using a borrowed laptop as my pc in not working, XP, P4 1.5GHz, RAM 240MB.
I know, very low end specs.
Last night, I plugged in the usb cable, power on and it starts to autoplay, I canceled it then nothing happen. I go to my computer and open my hard drive.
The whole laptop seems lag, so I directly switch off then on to my external hard drive, no autoplay happens so shut my laptop off and reopen. Before getting into desktop, a check disk program appear, checking my external hard drive, I canceled it. Straight into desktop, the whole laptop seems slow and lag.
I restart again, check disk appears again, this time I let it finish. After entering the desktop, I open my external drive, bam!! Nothing inside, totally blank.
I hover to my drive in My Computer, it shows around 254g used, total space is 465g. Space is used but nothing inside......why?
I restart my laptop; cleaning the usb; using testdisk. Nothing works.
Pls anyone response to my prob, I have everything in the disk drive.:pray:

P.S. All this happened within few minutes.
As I mention above everything happens to fast and sudden, I may forget some of the details.:smile:

Edit: When I scan my external hard drive, TR/Dropper.Gen is found. Is it the cause? What should I do to get back my all files??

Downloading straight to external hardrive

dizzymel — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:40:43 GMT

I want to download certain files and programs straight to my external hard drive(f drive) - verbatim model#USB250 - but whenever I do, they are still on my internal hard drive(c drive) as well, why? How do I change it, if it's even changeable? Will I just have to delete the internal drive afterward download? Does it have to do with browsers? I generally use Firefox 3.5 :4-dontkno I think my lack of experience is showing:grin: SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!

External Hard Drive cpu usage 100%

miguelk12 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:39:30 GMT

I have a SimpleTech 250gb external Hard drive and whenever I plug it in to the USB port on a computer the cpu usage goes way up to 100% and explorer.exe is 90-100% using it.:upset: I have to reboot the computer to get the CPU usage to get back to normal. While the computer is at 100% CPU usage I have been able to get some files to my computer but it takes 10 minutes to something that should take 2 minutes to transfer. I have EVERYTHING :sigh: on that hard drive and i am using about 200gb of it. I currently have no other hard drive big enough to get everything off it. Is there anyway to fix this other than nuking the hard drive?

Thanks to anyone who can help:pray:

P.S. I am a teen and I have limited skills and have a 0$ budget except for something for Christmas under 200$.

Backup HD "Not Found" Problem

Paul-D — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:35:26 GMT

While running chkdsk on my back up 750 GB HD, power was lost to home. On startup, post info said SATA2 (backup) drive "not found". I have about 400GB of backup data on the drive and would like some hints as to how i might recover at least part of data. This data was not mission critical so I am not prepared to pay much for recovery. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Paul-D

Maxtor 6L300R0 missing 270 GB

zer0sh0t — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:23:07 GMT

Specs:
64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate
Maxtor 6L300R0 HD (No jumper plugged in to run as a slave)

Primary HD: Maxtor 7V250F0 SATA

The Primary drive works fine but the secondary drive only recognizes 30 GB.

I read the other posts and it is not a jumper issue as the jumper was removed to make the drive a slave.

The Drive is the only Device connected on the Cable.

Any Help?

losing space on hard drive

zenit84 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:53:43 GMT

Hello all,

The free space on my hard drive is being gradually eaten into for some reason. It's an 18.6GB hard drive and, despite having run disk cleanup, deleted most of the superfluous programs and files, I can't free up more than a few hundred MBs worth of space. And any space I do free up is subsequently eaten into and it�s not long before the computer is advising me to free up more.

My computer is a Sony Vaio PCG-V505BP and although it's quite old (six years) it has worked pretty well up until now. I've looked on the internet to try and find an answer but most of the pages relating to my problem have been relatively unhelpful.

I assumed I had a virus so I downloaded the free avast! antivirus and ran a scan but it failed to find anything. Is there anything else I can do or does anyone have any recommendations?

I'm somewhat of a technophobe, so I may have overlooked some glaringly obvious solutions! But any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

External Formatting problems :(

alphonzo_evans — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:32:20 GMT

I have a 250gig external hard-drive ive had for about a year or so. anyway it started to act up and not allow me to transfer any files over a gig to or from it. worried that it would break down, i made a back up of all my artwork and everything important on to several disks and decided to format the external. during the format sadly my cat his the cord and disconnected it. Seance then for the last 3 days i have tried twice to format it to ntfs and after HOURS of formatting it just seems to stay at 79%. I even left it over night and it was still at 79% when i woke up the next day. I have been doing it with the disk manager, I'm running windows vista. Am i doing anything wrong? please help me out, i would hate to have to buy a new external HDD. :sigh: :4-dontkno

Hard Disk Not being read

sunitbakshi2225 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:49:06 GMT

I have a desktop with a SATA Hardrive of 160GB. The computer does not boot and read the hard disk, but boots when the hard disk is removed or disconnected. Does it mean, the hard disk has gone bad or the malfunction i s due to a virus or some other related proble? And can the data be retrieved?
Pleas advice
Thanx