Four Hard drives stopped working at once!!

[InfinitePilgrim]

Hello all,

Today when I turned my PC on, I saw the BIOS POST was taking an abnormally long amount of time to detect the HDD's in my PC, I had 5 x 2TB drives connected to the onboard ICH10R controller, and 4 of them was reported as bad. After hours of troubleshooting, I determined that all four of them were not spinning up was the problem which was weird, to say the least. Following are the steps I did next

* Hard drives are: 2 x Seagate ST2000DM001, 2 x Toshiba DT01ACA200
* Since the drives were not spinning up at all I thought there might have been a power surge and TVS Diodes might have been damaged, so I checked them on all the drives, they seem to be fine
* All the 0Ohm resistors are fine
* At this point only other thing, I could think of doing, was checking the HDD's serial output, here I faced a problem, Toshiba DT01ACA200 has only two pins for its serial out (could it be I2C?), and I couldn't find the pinouts for them, so I moved on to the Seagate drives, I connected my TTL module but there was no serial output at all. Suddenly I realized that as soon as I pressed ctrl + z the drive started spinning up (Still no serial output though), I wasted no time and connected a SATA cable and lo and behold it got detected, all the data is intact and SMART was not reporting any errors. I copied all the data on that drive to another drive. I tried this several times and I can confirm that every time I press ctrl+z drive starts working, but it will not spin up by itself. (This is true for both Seagate drives)

My questions are

* What do you think is wrong with these drives?
* Does anyone here know how to connect to the Toshiba DT01ACA200 drives using serial with only two pins?

Your help is much appreciated since there's so much valuable data at stake.

[Cris]

I wonder if it is PUIS causing the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-up_in_standby

[InfinitePilgrim]

I wonder if it is PUIS causing the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-up_in_standby

Whoa that's an idea, I shall investigate, thank you ever so much, this looks very promising.

[Cris]

I believe this tool can disable / enable PUIS:

http://www.hdat2.com/

http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html#q19

[InfinitePilgrim]

Hi Cris, it was indeed PUIS that was causing the problem, the way I figured Windows 10 Technical Preview, which I installed on a separate SSD just yesterday might have enabled this feature on all the hard drives, but they just stayed that way even after the OS loaded, I used HDAT2 to disable APM and PUIS. This almost gave me a heart attack, thank so much for figuring it out.

[fzabkar]

See the explanation by the "The Windows Storage Team" in this thread:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 0cad9759c9

[InfinitePilgrim]

See the explanation by the "The Windows Storage Team" in this thread:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 0cad9759c9

Yes fzabkar, after this I did some searching and found out it was indeed a bug in the Technical Preview. I think they recommend using hdparm to disable PUIS.