Intel DH55TC/Core i3 550 - Hard drives magically disappeared (temporarily)

[Kal El of Krypton]

Since the Intel support forums appear to be a vast desolate wasteland of inactivity, I'm going to post this thread here instead hoping someone can help.

Hey everyone,

I put together a system over Christmas with the following:

Intel DH55TC Motherboard (was running a bios from 2010-06-14, updated to 2010-10-18 after problem)
Intel Core i3 550 CPU (not overclocked)
Mushkin DDR3 1333Mhz 8GB (2x4GB)
Crucial C300 SSD 64GB
Seagate 1TB SATA HDD
Seasonic 380 watt PSU
Hauppauge 2250 capture card
Asus SATA DVDRW
Antec Remote Fusion Case (front panel LCD not hooked up)
Windows 7 64 bit

The machine appeared to be working fine until today when I noticed that BeyondTV reported an error recording. When I looked at "My Computer", I noticed that my 1TB Seagate drive just stopped appearing. Very confused, I decided to reboot the machine.

The machine stayed on the BIOS screen for a while, and then attempted to boot via PXE and failed due to their being no media.

I rebooted again and looked at the system information for the drives, and it said that no drives were attached to SATA 1 or 3 (the SSD and Seagate, respectively).

Now I'm starting to freak out. I shut down, changed the SSD from SATA 1 to SATA 4, and the machine boots fine. I shut it down, plugged it back into SATA 1, and saw a brief issue displayed just before booting that had to do with some Intel table error. Unfortunately, it was too fast to really see the whole thing.

I rebooted again hoping to see the error message, which was still too quick. On the final reboot, the error message stopped displaying.

I updated the BIOS thinking perhaps it was a motherboard bug. The update went fine, and so far I haven't had a failure or seen an error.

EDIT: the drives are not in AHCI mode

Any idea what could be causing this?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is the Seagate a 7200.11? Did you update its firmware? They have a tendency to die, their firmware corrupts itself, if you don't update it before that happens. Then the BIOS doesn't detect it anymore.

 

[Kal El of Krypton]

Nope, 7200.12, just pulled up my newegg history:

1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM

The weird thing was that, on reboot, both the drives no longer showed up in the BIOS.

 

[Bish]

I had that happen on mine when I was updating the firmware on my c300. Would not see the drive until I did a power down. Never had a problem after that though.

 

[Delta6Echo]

Is the Seagate a 7200.11? Did you update its firmware? They have a tendency to die, their firmware corrupts itself, if you don't update it before that happens. Then the BIOS doesn't detect it anymore.

I have the same issues but with a Seagate 7200.10. Is there a solution to this problem?

D6E

 

[SanDiegoPC]

I know I may get flak for this but I have to say ... it's the same kind of stuff I experienced years ago and it caused me to quit buying SG drives.

I know that for every drive I have RMA'd to Seagate/Maxtor there's a thousand others that work fine. But in my experience building hundreds - maybe a thousand - machines since the Windows 95 days, I have learned to avoid those brand names like the plague.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the 7200.12 drives had a firmware issue as well, although this is less well-known.

 

[Kal El of Krypton]

UPDATE

This just happened again. I was watching a show on BeyondTV when it suddenly froze completely. I've had it lock up before, but almost never to the point of force closing.

I tried restarting it after force closing and it wouldn't come up at all. The entire machine started to lock up.

When I rebooted, the same issue as before came up: the motherboard didn't see the SSD drive OR the HDD.

I looked at the event log and there was nothing (event logging is enabled as well).

I tried mucking around with the settings and changed it from IDE to AHCI mode and Windows 7 stopped booting (although I have the AHCI driver installed). What's really strange though is what happened as I changed it back and forth:
Switched to AHCI, it detected the SSD and NOT the HDD
Switched back to IDE, detected neither
Switched back to AHCI, detected both
Switched back to IDE, detected both and booted

I'm at a loss for words here. I'm more inclined to blame the mobo than the drives at this point.

 

[AC2]

A few dumb suggestions
- Seasonic 380 watt PSU: Is this sufficient for your build
- SATA data/ power cables: Maybe loosened by all the shifting around? Or maybe quality of the data cables not good
- Motherboard BIOS version: Please have a look if there is a BIOS update that is specific to your issue

Agree its probably not a drive failure, unless you're an incredibly unlucky guy to have 2 drives failing at the same time!

 

[Kal El of Krypton]

A few dumb suggestions
- Seasonic 380 watt PSU: Is this sufficient for your build
- SATA data/ power cables: Maybe loosened by all the shifting around? Or maybe quality of the data cables not good
- Motherboard BIOS version: Please have a look if there is a BIOS update that is specific to your issue

Agree its probably not a drive failure, unless you're an incredibly unlucky guy to have 2 drives failing at the same time!

PSU should be fine; according to the following link, the system under load is < 150W
http://techgage.com/article/asus_p7h55d-m_evo_intel_dh55tc/11

Other than that, the only drain on power is the hard drive (25W max?), the SSD (< 5W), the Hauppauge 2250 (looks like < 10W) and the DVD Rom which is almost never used.

I've updated the BIOS to the most recent version.

I might fiddle with the power cables. I'm thinking that I'll be replacing this board with this one though:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131623

That one has consistently better reviews.

 

[AC2]

Hmm one last suggestion, your mobo supports SATA II (3 Gbps) but I'm guessing your drives (SSD and/ or HDD) MAY be SATA III (6 Gbps)... While SATA II/ III are supposed to be compatible I've heard of exceptions to this rule...

The rear of the drives should have a jumper config to set them at SATA II (3 Gbps)... Try that?

 

[Kal El of Krypton]

Just happened again last night; BeyondTV couldn't record, the 1TB drive went missing. Did the AHCI/IDE tap dance for a little while and wouldn't boot. Switched the 1TB drive to a different SATA connector and then it booted fine. Still having issues with the display as well; sometimes the text (even in the BIOS) will be outlined with a 1 pixel white border, making it near impossible to read.

Just ordered the Asus board I linked to above. Here's hoping...