I recently built a new pc and for about half a year everything was good untill one day one of my internal storage drives popped up as a flash drive so I just exited out and went along pc ing untill it happened again and again and accompanied now with a window saying it wanted to scan for errors, that and it started making clicking noises. So I assumed it was on it's way out so I bought an exact drive to replace it..a seagate ST3500413AS. I got the new exact same model drive and plugged it in and all was good for at least a month when with the new drive it started happening again the exact same things. One day I turned on my computer and that drive was not to be found, not in my computer, disk management or the device manager. I know it's spinning and I've tried hooking it up to a free 3gb/sec sata port and then a 6gb/sec sata port and still it's not being recognized by nothing. When I plugged the drive into a usb external hdd docking station it showed up. I want to know what is up and how can I fix it? I already wasted money on a new exact drive and have tried plugging it into 2 different sata ports with the same result. PLEASE HELP

Ok, so if it shows up, what is the problem? Do you need to recover the data? If it shows up OK, why don't you just copy it to a new drive?

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1) Did you try the drives on a different PC / System ?
2) Are you perfectly sure the PSU on your PC is working fine ?

So said I would check the motherboard and cabling to weed out the "obvious" problems.
It is unlike for 2 drives in a row to be defective (unless they are from same batch.... but the coincidences would be too many) .

Next , I would analyze the drives to see if they have developed bad blocks and (but this require either know how or dedicated tools) analyze internal logs to see exactly what's going on and what happened. This kind of diagnose can say if the problem was internal or external.
Common "in-situ" causes of "error growth" are power related or interface related (yes !!).

Then you ask how to fix it... a problem.... If they are just "soft errors" you can try the only option at your disposal : ZEROFILL the drive (WARNING !! IT IS DESTRUCTIVE FOR DATA !!) and see if the errors are gone. If not, only professional help can do something.

I plugged it into the usb to see if the problem was the drive....I used the docking station to transfer over the
data from the "defective" drive to my new one which as stated has started doing the same thing the "defective" drive
was doing.

No I haven't tried it on another pc yet and I don't think the wiring has anything to do with it. I hooked up
both drives to 2 different sata cables to see if it was the drive or the cable but both drives on both the
3 and 6gb sata cables did the same thing and yeah I'm pretty sure my psu is fine.

If it's not the cables and if it's not the drives because I replaced the so called defective drive with an
exact same model what else can it be and why all of a sudden after 6 months of perfect operation?

If you are sure everything is fine there's no other explanation than UFOs or you got 2 lemon in a row - don't want to think at Seagate someone hates you ...

Jokes apart, only a thorough diagnose (that unfortunately you can't do) can explain what happened EXACTLY. Concentrate on solution , if possible.

P.S. I would also check BIOS (updated ?) and compatibility of your system with that specific drive. Would not be the 1st time that one drive (or family ?) doesn't work properly and other - instead - do.
Again, only an analysis of internal logs can reveal what you want to know. PLEASE don't ask me how to do it on your own or anything else about it.

Update....the drive just popped up with an autoplay menu and starting working again...for now WTF is going on I haven't done or changed anything in the time I started this post,

Back it up as fast as you can then. It doesn't sound like a very good long term storage solution to me - you may want to scrap it and get a new drive.

_________________
Nationwide data recovery services for RAID servers and laptops - http://www.harddriverecovery.org/

I just bought this one to replace the last drive. I'm running a brand new exact model hard drive. The same things keep happening no matter what drive I use. Oh and coincidentally my drive once again vanished from my computer again. It should pop back up in the next day or two, I can't believe this shit.

Have you checked you SATA cables on this one. I find out that some SATA cables are not good here on the islands and I have had some of these issues before. I now purchase the better quality SATA cables they sell here but still find some issues in them too. You can try to get some new SATA cables on this one and see if it helps too. But also like BlackST said on this one you have to determine the exact problems. It could be something in the MB. One MB brand new out of box could not have the Reset switch on the front panel connected to it. If I connected this the board would not power on. I changed boxes, PS, and everything else and still would not work. Found out later that the market who sold these said they had some issues on a few of them they did this. So there is other reasons behind this one. I also had other issues where the HDD on certain MB would disappear and be found again by plugging the SATA cable to another slot. So you see this one can give issues on this so it is necessary to try and narrow it down to why it is happening on this one. I would start off with only one HDD attached and one SATA and check all connectors, PS, and go from there on it. Good luck let us know what you find out on this.

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Iorana Haraharaini

I think it might be power related....I suspect that the sata power cable is bad or perhaps the modular port on my PSU went bad. I'm going to try a different power cable and/or switch the cable to a different port on the psu and see what happens.
It can't be the hard drives because I've been through 2 of them now and it can't be the ports on the motherboard so it's got to be the sata cable itself or it's the power cable. It's funny how it's just happening to just this one drive/port.

I agree with PSU - it is faulty! This particular drive is most probably fragile and could be kicking bucket on bad power. Never say no to PSU - PSU is almost same state-of-art device as HDD. PSU in computer have to survive surges, spikes, noise - it very hard to design good PSU and good PSU is worth a lot. If you have PSU worth below $100 - you have time bomb not PSU. Good and reliable electronics and design cost. Obviously price is not only factor, but weak PSU for PC could cause disaster. I have changed PSU, because it killed two BIOS FLASH chips on two separate motherboards in row! From that time I have no problem! Now I have very same PSU in server and it already killed two HDDs in row (there were 11 drives in server at once)!

Just reminded myself about two graphics cards in row as well. And most probably even 3dfx VooDoo4 as well and two motherboards - all happened on very same PSU!

P.S. I recommend XFX PRO850W - fully wired!, not modular!

Yeah I fixed it.....it was power related. The cable I had both drives hooked up to must have been faulty because after I hooked the drive up to a new power cable I haven't had the problem since.

After experiencing sparks from power connector I would stop to thrust PSU affected. This PSU is literally dead! Buy yourself new PSU - this PSU can fry whole computer one day. It is already severely damaged! Now you can experience failing components in your computer, if you will see any thing going not normal, your entire computer is affected. If any thing would die death on your using new PSU, there is big possibility whole computer would fail component after component. There is no way to prevent it! Most delicate are any FLASH/EEPROM chip, audio codec, ethernet PHY. RAM, CPU, chipset - those are unlikely to be directly affected. CPU, RAM, chipset - those have own PSUs on motherboard - they do protect them from spikes and surges from main PSU.

OP hasnt mentioned sparks?

I could misread this, but any way after such problems I would not believe this PSU any more. This PSU would and will damage every single component directly connected to it (components connected by separate PSU, like PSU on motherboard, would not be affected). This PSU is going to ruin whole system in matter of months and there is no way to prevent it. I know it not only from experience!

Yes, I think you have - or at least you are using guesses without evidence about the real cause.


Please explain how you can be so certain that the OP has/had a PSU problem, and not just a problem with the single SATA power cable, that the OP explained was being used for both "problem" drives?