Not so dumb! Nice call. Booting into safe mode the drive shows up. A reboot into full Win10 and it is still there. I'm still thinking about what that is telling me.
Vanishing hard drive
- Thread starter Diggs
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Not so dumb! Nice call. Booting into safe mode the drive shows up. A reboot into full Win10 and it is still there. I'm still thinking about what that is telling me.
Sky-Knight
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It's probably telling you another device is being a problem.
Does that thing have a multicard reader in it by chance? Because if the two drives are arguing over a drive letter, that can cause this.
Does that thing have a multicard reader in it by chance? Because if the two drives are arguing over a drive letter, that can cause this.
GreyWolf
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@Diggs I never said I was nice =) Well in my book that's telling me there is a conflicting driver reminds me of the days I used to fix ZipDrives check msconfig anything out of the ordinary, humm what happens if you let unsigned drivers? Also @Sky-Knight might be on to something under disk management any locked letters or windows defines them by default?
It has a PCI USB3 card in it. I put a 4th drive in the USB3 dock and it recognizes all four drives even through a reboot. Hmm.... No locked drives though it sure gives me something to think about.
Thanks for the great thoughts guys!
Sky-Knight
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Hard drives shouldn't break anything, Windows stores drive letter associations in the registry, and they are stored against the volume GUID of the disk. This applies to thumb drives as well, basically anything storage.
But multicard readers while they in theory do the exact same thing, which means they don't consume a drive letter until storage is attached... sometimes can work like floppy disks. So if you've got a drive set to mount to say the E drive, and the card reader goes to take over E... you'll end up with an E in the GUI that doesn't go anywhere.
But, in that circumstance you should still see all of the attached drives in Disk Management, and once you told it to move the hard disk to another letter it would pop right up.
The same thing can happen with mapped drives too, so a quick net use on the command line (not elevated) is a good idea too.
But multicard readers while they in theory do the exact same thing, which means they don't consume a drive letter until storage is attached... sometimes can work like floppy disks. So if you've got a drive set to mount to say the E drive, and the card reader goes to take over E... you'll end up with an E in the GUI that doesn't go anywhere.
But, in that circumstance you should still see all of the attached drives in Disk Management, and once you told it to move the hard disk to another letter it would pop right up.
The same thing can happen with mapped drives too, so a quick net use on the command line (not elevated) is a good idea too.
GreyWolf
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@Diggs Your welcome if we we're able to help you narrow down the problem, I definitely like Sky-Knight approach on the issue and at the same time he's given me nightmares I just remembered the subst command now that's a way to really mess things up. On a side note there is another peripheral that I just remembered that could assign a drive letter some printers have a usb port that will pop-up in windows as a drive.
Sky-Knight
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Hey I explicitly didn't mention subst! 
That one is on you! 
And good call on the USB printer... because you're correct on some of those too. Any USB peripheral that isn't a keyboard or mouse wouldn't be active in safe mode. Which would include USB card readers, or extra stuff on printers or scanners. Any of those devices are suspect at this point, because a card slot can do this regardless of what device it's attached to.
But again, if there's a conflict here USUALLY the disks all appear in Disk Management. Though I have seen a few that didn't... I've also got a Dell server behind me that simply cannot have more than 2 USB attached storage devices attached.. The main board will not enumerate any more, unless I get off the USB 3.0 controller. So it might be something like that too...
Yuck... just yuck.
That one is on you! And good call on the USB printer... because you're correct on some of those too. Any USB peripheral that isn't a keyboard or mouse wouldn't be active in safe mode. Which would include USB card readers, or extra stuff on printers or scanners. Any of those devices are suspect at this point, because a card slot can do this regardless of what device it's attached to.
But again, if there's a conflict here USUALLY the disks all appear in Disk Management. Though I have seen a few that didn't... I've also got a Dell server behind me that simply cannot have more than 2 USB attached storage devices attached.. The main board will not enumerate any more, unless I get off the USB 3.0 controller. So it might be something like that too...
Yuck... just yuck.
I don't have or use card readers at all on that machine but I do use the USB3 with multiple HDD/SSD drives (5 partition UEFI) quite often with nothing in the failing port (SATA 3). It seems when I go back to that port at some point it is gone. Printer (no card reader either) and NAS are networked and the NAS is a location without a drive letter.
The fact that I can throw it in and out of Safe Mode to get the port back and continue trouble shooting is huge. Thanks @GreyWolf . Sure gives me a few things to think about.
The fact that I can throw it in and out of Safe Mode to get the port back and continue trouble shooting is huge. Thanks @GreyWolf . Sure gives me a few things to think about.
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GreyWolf
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@Sky-Knight seems I like suffering I just learned something new
subst ♪: C:\Temp\
cd /D ♪:\
You can fake drive letters with symbols but I'll behave now @Diggs has enough on his plate just out of curiosity because seems sky here makes blast from the past show up or one heck of a deja vu 
(No joke just got a pm from a old tech buddy of mine on facebook been years) he suggested to check for hidden non used devices under device manager and removing them as there could be a crappy driver with a partial/same pid and that safe mode is loading one and then when windows decides to rescan it loads the other.
subst ♪: C:\Temp\
cd /D ♪:\
You can fake drive letters with symbols but I'll behave now @Diggs has enough on his plate
just out of curiosity because seems sky here makes blast from the past show up or one heck of a deja vu (No joke just got a pm from a old tech buddy of mine on facebook been years) he suggested to check for hidden non used devices under device manager and removing them as there could be a crappy driver with a partial/same pid and that safe mode is loading one and then when windows decides to rescan it loads the other.
I doubt it's a drive letter issue. Diggs reported in the first post that the drive does not show up in device manager. If there was a drive letter conflict that would happen once the volumes get mounted. If the drive doesn't show in device manager then it's not going to get to the point of mounting the volumes. So if it was drive letter issue the drive would be present in device manager and disk management but with a volume not mounted.
Sky-Knight
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Not always... but yes far less like to be a drive letter issue, and far more likely to be a driver conflict as GreyWolf mentioned. Still a head knocker that's for sure.
GreyWolf
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Out of curiosity as this seems the perfect problem for this candidate for this program https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html that shows what drivers are in use. I'd run it at the start when the drive shows up and the minute it vanishes re-run it again and find the culprit should the driver get hijacked this will definitely show the results.
@Sky-Knight I live for theses kinds of problems, regular installing of windows or standard hardware installation is routine without these kinds of problems I would of quit the business a long time ago.
@Sky-Knight I live for theses kinds of problems, regular installing of windows or standard hardware installation is routine without these kinds of problems I would of quit the business a long time ago.
ComputerRepairTech
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How unusual. I was searching for any similar cases didn't find anything like that but I did find a post of a guy claiming that as soon as he would lose 2 sata ports if he disconnected the front i/o panel. Could try disconnecting that and see if that changes anything or even disconnecting and reconnecting see if anything changes.
Booting into safe mode makes the drive show up 100% of the time?
Only done it once so far. Will try again next time the drive disappears. I'm leaning towards issues with the USB3 PCI card driver but need to investigate further.
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