16,022,846 members
Sign in
Sign in
Email
Password
Forgot your password?
Sign in with
home
articles
Browse Topics
>
Latest Articles
Top Articles
Posting/Update Guidelines
Article Help Forum
Submit an article or tip
Import GitHub Project
Import your Blog
quick answers
Q&A
Ask a Question
View Unanswered Questions
View All Questions
View C# questions
View C++ questions
View Visual Basic questions
View Javascript questions
View .NET questions
discussions
forums
CodeProject.AI Server
All Message Boards...
Application Lifecycle
>
Running a Business
Sales / Marketing
Collaboration / Beta Testing
Work Issues
Design and Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
ASP.NET
JavaScript
Internet of Things
C / C++ / MFC
>
ATL / WTL / STL
Managed C++/CLI
C#
Free Tools
Objective-C and Swift
Database
Hardware & Devices
>
System Admin
Hosting and Servers
Java
Linux Programming
Python
.NET (Core and Framework)
Android
iOS
Mobile
WPF
Visual Basic
Web Development
Site Bugs / Suggestions
Spam and Abuse Watch
features
features
Competitions
News
The Insider Newsletter
The Daily Build Newsletter
Newsletter archive
Surveys
CodeProject Stuff
community
lounge
Who's Who
Most Valuable Professionals
The Lounge
The CodeProject Blog
Where I Am: Member Photos
The Insider News
The Weird & The Wonderful
help
?
What is 'CodeProject'?
General FAQ
Ask a Question
Bugs and Suggestions
Article Help Forum
About Us
Search within:
Articles
Quick Answers
Messages
Use my saved
content filters
Ask a Question
All
Questions
All
Unanswered
FAQ
BIOS fails to recognize hard drive
Please
Sign up or sign in
to vote.
5.00/5 (1 vote)
See more:
(untagged)
This is no joke!
For a second time in past two years I have this weird problem.
My internal hard drive (dynamic disk with mirrors) gradually disappeared from the BIOS.
By gradually I mean sometime it was there and another time it was not.
The Logical Disk Management (win2000) would report dynamic disk missing and reactivation would say the disk cannot be located.
During the windows startup I would get two consecutive short beeps at random until the windows starts – maybe two or five of them.
I had this happened before ( different box, same OS) and the temporary solution was to take the drive out of the machine (!) and place it vertically next to it! I am not kidding!
So, last night I took the drive out of the box (vertical mount) and turn the power on.
Did not touch any cabling!
Guess what - it loaded and RAID started regenerating my mirrors!
I put it back into the box and it worked just peachy the whole day.
Today – zilch, same old problem - disk is just not there!
Of course the disk is out of warranty and the vendor could careless about my problem.
In reality I do not want to spend much time troubleshooting this, but this is a second time around and I feel the hard drive should last past the warranty period.
Before I toss this worthless drive – can anybody tell me what could be wrong and where are these beeps coming from.
My best guess is that the drive has some temperature related issues.
Or maybe “consumer grade “ run of the mill drives are not suitable for RAID – the forced or hidden regeneration may be too stressful.
Thanks for reading. Any constructive comments are appreciated, just please do not waste my time telling me that drives are cheap and to buy a new one.
Vaclav
Posted
18-Jul-08 4:48am
Vaclav_
Add a Solution
1
solution
Please
Sign up or sign in
to vote.
Solution 1
Accept Solution
Reject Solution
The beeps are most likely your RAID controller or BIOS reporting that it can't see the drive you've configured.
I'd check and replace the cables. They do fail if damaged, and often intermittent connections occur where it works in a certain range of temperature or certain positions, but not others.
Likewise, electronics can fail when subjected to shock or high temperatures. There can also be poor joints in the soldered board which eventually fail with vibration, shock or temperature.
If it's mirrored, and replacing the cables doesn't help, toss the drive. It just isn't worth investigating the problem. If it's bad electronics or weak joints it can't be fixed without replacing the drive's controller board anyway.
Consumer drives are pretty much identical to 'enterprise' ones, except that the enterprise drives generally have write-back buffers disabled (consumer drives will report that they have written data when they have written it to the on-drive cache, not actually to the disk itself, so you can lose data on losing power that the OS thought was written) and also have aggressive error-recovery disabled. Consumer drives will re-read sectors that have errors repeatedly, leading to long delays if there is a problem, but it might be able to recover the data. Enterprise drives are intended for use in mirrored or parity-protected arrays, the system can recover the data from other drives, so the recovery is much reduced so the OS or RAID controller can get on with doing that, then replace the bad sector.
Drives often do last quite a long time. We recently had to replace one that had been in service for six years in a RAID array in a server - this was a setup with Windows 2000 Server mirroring the data on consumer IDE drives. Unfortunately it's common for drives in the same batch to fail at more-or-less the same time, if they haven't been subjected to different stresses. Some administrators get drives from different batches or even different manufacturers for this reason.
Sometimes, though, drives fail much sooner. In a computer I bought for my parents in 2001, the disk failed in less than three months. (It was replaced under warranty by the manufacturer.)
Permalink
Share this answer
Posted
18-Jul-08 5:59am
Mike Dimmick
Comments
Vaclav_
25-Mar-11 10:21am
I am a little late in posting my comments, but basically I had a failing hard drive which eventually crashed for good.
Lesson learned - if in doubt - toss it out!
Add a Solution
Add your solution here
B
I
U
S
small
BIG
code
Plain Text
ASM
ASP
ASP.NET
BASIC
BAT
C#
C++
COBOL
CoffeeScript
CSS
Dart
dbase
F#
FORTRAN
HTML
Java
Javascript
Kotlin
Lua
MIDL
MSIL
ObjectiveC
Pascal
PERL
PHP
PowerShell
Python
Razor
Ruby
Scala
Shell
SLN
SQL
Swift
T4
Terminal
TypeScript
VB
VBScript
XML
YAML
var
<
>
&
link
[^]
encode
untab
case
indent
outdent
OK
Paste as
Strip HTML
Encode HTML
Paste as-is
Code block
Quoted Text
Best guess
To display as
The content must be between 30 and 50000 characters.
Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML
Preview
0
…
Existing Members
Sign in to your account
...or Join us
Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.
Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?
Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your
password
?
Optional Password
I have read and agree to the
Terms of Service
and
Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters
Submit your solution
When answering a question please:
Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or
edit the question
and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.
Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.
Top Experts
Last 24hrs
This month
Richard Deeming
95
Dave Kreskowiak
78
Pete O'Hanlon
20
Rahul VB
10
Espen Harlinn
5
Richard Deeming
335
Pete O'Hanlon
310
OriginalGriff
150
merano99
130
Dave Kreskowiak
113
Related Questions
Backing up to external hard drive
Getting Hard Drive Space
Web application fails to recognize code-behind VB for new panel control
Hard drive formating
saving to the hard drive
Identify Hard Drive.
Serial no of Hard Disk or Hard Drive….using C#
Get drive letter of Hard drive
What is wrong with this my hard disc serial number getting code?
how to securely overwrite a hard drive.
CodeProject, 20 Bay Street, 11th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2N8 +1 (416) 849-8900