vanishing drive after I try to take permissions over in win7

[Dave48838]

I have a customers Fujitsu mh2250bh drive in, I reloaded windows 7 on it just under a month ago, the last time it successfully booted in to windows was over 2 weeks ago. Data recovery is not an issue being that I am only missing a weeks worth of stuff. The customer isn't concerned with that. What the laptop was doing when it came in was not finishing it's windows boot, it would hang on the windows icon screen.

I can view the files in linux, in win7 I can see the users folder and the users inside that folder, but when I try to access the needed account, it goes through the 5 minutes of taking permissions then the drive vanishes, it doesn't show up in my computer or disk management until I reboot. I can even scan for hardware changes and it won't show up.

I ran a mhdd test on it and it came out fine. what other tests could I do to determine whether or not to reuse this drive or get them a new one. I've had a vanishing drive before but that was a desktop and it was over heating big time. but this is consistently after I try to take permissions.

any help would be appreciated,
Thanks,
Dave

[Cleanroom]

if mhdd came back as perfectly clean, then it is a software issue..

You could try making a image of the drive in winhex to see if it encounters any issues. Make a Mirror image to an external drive.

That is a good second test.

but it sounds like it just has windows software issues and the drive is fine.

[Vulcan]

the drive vanishes, it doesn't show up in my computer or disk management until I reboot.

This specific behaviour does sound more like a hardware problem to me (although not necessarily with the drive itself). Does the drive always appear normally (in BIOS, Windows "Computer" and "Device Manager") immediately after a reboot - or does it ever need extra reboots before the drive is usable?

I ran a mhdd test on it and it came out fine.

Which specific MHDD test do you mean? When you say "fine", what were the exact results - do you have a photo of the MHDD screen so we can see the result?

what other tests could I do to determine whether or not to reuse this drive

Check the Windows event logs on that drive, to see if it contains any relevant drive or drive-controller related errors.

Then I would connect this drive as a slave to a desktop where smartmontools (Linux or Windows versions are available) has been installed (or boot the laptop from a Linux Live CD which includes smartmontools already), and run smartctl -a (or, even better, smartctl -x if it is available on that version of smartmontools) in order to try to collect all the available public details, including the drive's internal error log. Entries in that log may reveal more. There's an example of the type of output to expect, in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23204

Redirect the text into a file on another drive (or ramdisk) and attach the file with your reply. I've written about similar testing in other threads. Here's a previous (unfortunately incomplete) thread with a slightly similar problem, which includes other suggestions:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24232