Hard Drives

[carlos]

Can anyones shed some light on my latest problem please? I've got a 250GB hard drive as a primary slave - every so often my pc restarts by itself, and when it comes back on, the 250GB drive has dissapeared - The last time it did this, when it came back on the drive was still present but when i tried to access it i got a message saying that the drive wasn't formatted - would i like to format now? I opened the case up and attached it to a different power cable and set it as the secondary slave. When i restarted it was still missing. I went into device manager and told it to scan for hardware changes but it found nothing. I thought that was that so i put everything back to how it was at the begining and restarted. When windows returned the drive was still missing, however, when i went into device manager and told it to scan again the drive was detected and everything was fine again - i could access it as normal - This has happened about 4 times in the last 2 years - does anyone have any idea why? Thanks in advance - Carlos

[stevie21]

Your PC restarting could be an intermittent problem with your computer's power supply. The power supply to that hard drive might be suffering as well.

Not 100% certain though from other info you've mentioned : it's detected after scanning for hardware. Maybe it's receiving power again at some point *after* rebooting & that's why a scan discovers it?

Just a guess. As I say, I'm far from certain.

[carlos]

Thanks stevie21 - That's kinda the direction i was thinking - thanks for the advice mate.

[carlos]

Right - so i've changed the power supply from a 300W to a 400W and the problem is still present - i'm getting around it by returning to last good configuration, then scaning for new devices - it's worked twice now - any ideas as to whats causing this to happen?