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Thread ID: 44118 2004-04-07 22:41:00 Missing drives karent (5222) Press F1
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227929 2004-04-07 22:41:00 Sometimes on startup I can't see all my drives. From memory, the "missing" ones are D, E and (I think) G. A restart fixes the problem. Any idea why this happens, anyone? I'm running WinXP Pro.
Oh, and also I sometimes the PC won't boot up at all. Once again, switching off/on fixes it.
Thanks.
karent (5222)
227930 2004-04-08 01:51:00 What sort of devices are D, E, and G? Are they USB memory card readers, cameras, external CD or HD? Are they turned off or not plugged in when it comes up?
Let us know and we can try to move things forward for you.
robo.
robo (205)
227931 2004-04-08 04:59:00 Sorry for taking so long to get back. Made the mistake of going grocery shopping and it seems the whole of the rest of the planet was there. Anyhow, the drives concerned are labelled Data (D) Local Disk; Backup (E) Local Disk; and G is the DVD drive. Come to think of it, the F: drive (CD-RW) might occasionally fall off too. The problem I describe happens about once out of every 20 start-ups. Weird. karent (5222)
227932 2004-04-08 04:59:00 Sorry for taking so long to get back. Made the mistake of going grocery shopping and it seems the whole of the rest of the planet was there. Anyhow, the drives concerned are labelled Data (D:) Local Disk; Backup (E:) Local Disk; and G is the DVD drive. Come to think of it, the F: drive (CD-RW) might occasionally fall off too. The problem I describe happens about once out of every 20 start-ups. Weird. karent (5222)
227933 2004-04-08 07:11:00 hey karent,

This seems like a hardware problem, can you give partitioning information on the drives, just to verify that C: is not having problems.

It could be the second IDE controller failing on the motherboard, and that the C: and CD-RW exist on the same controller, and the 2nd Hard Drive and the DVD exist on the same controller.

A bad combination performance wise but still should work. Another thing is that both controllers are failing, which leads me to think the mobo could have problems and may end up failing eventually.

Could also be the drivers for the motherboard are playing up, make sure you have updated these drivers but this would not explain the not booting up problem, unless they are RAID IDE controllers and need bios updates.

Another possibility is Windows XP is being forgetful, possibly problems with RAM or a corrupt installation of XP.

Apart from that, it's going to be a mission to figure out what is causing the problems.


Noel Nosivad.
Noel Nosivad (389)
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