G75 BB HDD Sometimes Missing After Reboot

I just picked up the Best Buy G75 to replace my HP DV7 that had its ATI card die. I was able to disable the ATI and give it to my wife as an upgrade running the iGPU.

Anyway, the first thing I did was put the stock drive in the secondary bay and added my 128GB M4 SSD to the primary bay. I have done a fresh install and deleted all the factory partitions and made one partition on the 1TB HDD using all available space. Everything works and it boots and runs very fast.

However, occasionally when I reboot it will dump me into Windows without the D: drive (1TB factory HDD) showing up. It isn't even in the device manager or disk management. Once I reboot and go into the BIOS it shows up there under the secondary SATA port, P1. Usually after that it will show up when I boot back into Windows.

Is this a bad drive, a bad SATA port, or simply a bad driver? Could it be skipping over something during bootup? Has this happened to anyone else? I hate to return it just for that issue because of all the reinstall/restore backup work involved.

 

What happens if you swap drive bays for the SSD and HDD? That may help home in on what is the problem.

 

I haven't tried that, but I guess that would tell me if the port is defective. I just figured the boot drive should be on the primary port P0 and the storage drive on P1 (DVD on P2). The port obviously works, just not sure why it is sometimes dropping the drive. Maybe it has something to do with all the updates and installs I'm doing. I also thought that the Asus Instant-On program could be screwing it up, but I noticed I had it disabled. Maybe I'll just uninstall it.

 

If the SDD is intermittently not recognized after the switch, it could be the port or the connector used to attach the drive to the port, or the connection itself.

If the HDD still is intermittently not recognized on the new port, it is likely a problem with the HDD.

 

I have a similar problem with my G73. I bought an SSD and put it in the primary SATA port and installed the OS on it. I moved the original HDD over to the secondary port and formatted it for extra space. It worked fine for a while then problems started happening when trying to access any data from the HDD in the secondary SATA port. I noticed that the laptop started to audibly "beep" sometimes when accessing data from the secondary HDD, and when that happened, whatever I was trying to do (ie. copy files, play a game, etc.) would fail/crash. The drive would then disappear from windows for a few moments, then reappear as if Windows just detected a new drive asking what I wanted to do with this new volume (open the folder, etc.).

This started getting more frequent, and sometimes the drive just never appeared in Windows until I rebooted. I thought the drive was failing because of the noises I was hearing when this happened. So I went out and bought a new drive, but the same thing is happening with it! I guess there's something wrong with the secondary SATA port - I really haven't tried to troubleshoot it yet, but as of now it's unusable...any time I try to do anything involving a drive plugged into the secondary SATA port, it just crashes.

Does anyone know if there's a way to fix this or am I SOL?

 

It could be a bad SATA connector board, or you may just need to reseat the connection. If reseating fails, you could spend some money (probably about $40) to buy a new connector board to see if that resolves the issue.

If you are still under warranty and a simple connection reseat fails (sounds like it may already have failed since you installed a new secondary HDD without resolving the issue), then maybe an RMA is best option.

 

I rebooted a few times yesterday and could not reproduce the problem.

The laptop is less than a week old, but Best Buy doesn't have any current local stock. If it happens again and they have stock then I'll probably return it. If it happens again and they don't have stock I may start to check the boards and stuff. I did get my WHS2011 to backup both drives so a restore should be pretty simple.

 

My mistake! I thought you had an older system.

I would be returning it (even for a refund) unless I could confirm I just made a bad HDD connection. You don't want to be dealing with that type of problem on a brand new (or even refurbished) system.

 

How are you checking that if bestbuy has it in stock or not? if online then go check it yourself in the store, sometimes they have things at store but online it doesn't show up, when i was going to get a g75vw for myself, i checked online and it said not available. but when i went there they had it (one out at the display and 1 back in the stock area), i don't say that its always the case but, don't stick with it if its a bad machine, if they don't have it they can probably order it from another location for you.

 

I still can't get it to reproduce the problem. It may have been related to updates/drivers installing during reboot.

I did pull the Blu-ray drive from my dead HP laptop and swapped it for the DVD drive in the G75. If only my faceplate said Blu-ray instead of DVD...