I have a relatively new assembled PC with two Seagate SATA hard drives. An 80GB drive (C:) holds OS (Windows XP) and a 250GB (E:) holds all my data (with My Documents etc. moved to the 250GB). In addition both hard drives are partitioned into two (the secondary partition D: on the 80GB I use as a backup for some of my data, and the secondary partition F: on the 250GB is used for the swap file).
This has been working ok but a few weeks back the 250GB drive appeared to fail, not being recognised in Windows or BIOS. After much trial and error I replaced the drive and got things working again.
However today the new 250GB drive again failed in Windows. The drive is still visible in BIOS but not in Windows (not present at all in Device Manager). I have checked the cable connections and they seem to be fine. However this sounds like a hardware problem somewhere, but not with the drive itself: I presume the first ‘faulty’ drive I replaced wasn’t actually faulty.
I’d appreciate some pointers as to what the problem could be and how I can get the drive working again, since I don’t want to be replacing hard drives every few days 🙂
Cheers
— Mike —