Secondary Hard Drive Disappearing

So, I have an P150HM with a crucial m4 128gb SSD as my main drive and a 750gb HDD (whatever malibal ships is what I have). I got my laptop a little over a month ago.

Just yesterday, I started having really bad problems. Lots of freezing.

I was able to track down at least one issue (hopefully the main/only issue). My secondary drive seems to be disappearing. My system freezes, and then it disappears and stops showing up in windows explorer or device manager. Re-booting generally brings it back (although I just rebooted it now, and I don't see it... )

When I first start my computer, I'm able to listen to music and open pictures that are on my secondary drive. But if I try to log into my steam account (steam is installed on my secondary drive), my entire computer freezes for about 10 seconds (doesn't even let me move my mouse), and then a few seconds later my secondary hard drive is gone. . The problem doesn't seem to be triggered only by steam, but it is a reliable way to reproduce it.

Here is a log of "major things" I've done with my computer recently, starting from last week:

Last week (Monday/Tuesday): Installed ~30gb of games from steam. Played them a little bit, but not very much.

Wednesday through Saturday: Nothing. My computer was in sleep mode during this entire time (probably should've shut it down....)

Sunday morning: Installed iTunes, imported about 12gb of music from an external hard drive to my secondary drive. Started noticing problems not too long after. Freezes, google chrome not opening (google chrome is on my primary drive), long boot times, waking up from sleep with a black screen, one time my display driver even crashed.

Sunday afternoon: Did a system restore, going back to before iTunes was installed. Things seemed a little bit better, but I was still having issues.

Monday morning: Noticed the issue with my secondary hard drive disappearing. Grr.



Help please? Not sure where to start. I'm probably not even in the right forum. I checked the physical connection, and it seemed fine. My secondary hard drive isn't even showing up now after a reboot... I'll try again and hopefully it will be there.

 

If you just got it you should be covered by a warranty. I would just contact the vendor and get my money's worth out of that warranty if I was you.

If you prefer to attempt troubleshooting yourself first, remove the 2nd HDD and run it for a few days. If the problems go away you know the issue is with that 2nd drive or HDD controller.

 

Yeah it sounds like the hard drive is having some issues...You can use a program like HDTune to check the S.M.A.R.T. of the drive which will just tell you if something is going wrong with it. You can either contact your reseller (which is what I recommend) to see if they can get the drive replaced for you or attempt more troubleshooting (which may lead up to you getting it RMA'd anyway).

 

I'm running HDTune right now... This is bad, yes?




Time to RMA that drive? I'm not sure what all the information in the second screenshot means, but those are the only two yellow-highlighted items in the list.

I really hope that a bad hard drive is the only reason I'm having these issues.

 

@rcon

It looks bad ,but for a rma you need to download and run SeaTools


http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaTools_for_Windows.pdf

SeaTools for Windows | Seagate

 

Thank you sir! Running it now.

Edit: Short Drive Self Test = Fail.

It's telling me I can use SeaTools for DOS to try and repair some sectors, but to be honest, if a drive is failing this quickly and I'm still way under my warranty, I'd rather just get a new one. Who knows when it will completely fail. Is the next step to contact malibal?

Thanks again for the help.

 

Yeah contact them asap. The sooner you get a replacement the better for you.

 

Yes, please open a ticket on the site and we'll get it taken care of. Hard drives are one of those parts that may work fine for years, but can also fail within days. That's the rub with being the only mechanical part in modern PC's.

 

I had nightmares with 50% of all Hitachi HDDs that I owned in my life. The last one that made me sell my desktop PC was a brand new 1TB Hitachi that started having bad sectors all of a sudden and I had many MP3s from my collection becoming unreadable and unsave-able.

Good ridden's of that drive and of the desktop PC.