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This is an issue that's been happening for a while yet, but only recently have I been able to put any attention to it.

About 3 weeks ago, I bought 2x1TB WD Caviar Black drives. They installed fine, and I began migrating data to them.

A week later, suddenly BIOS is taking 3x normal to recognize the drives, but they do get recognized. However, Windows doesn't load them and the only way I can get them to be seen is to rescan the disks in Disk Management. That does the trick, but the fix is only good until the next reboot, and I have to do it all over again.

A couple things to note:

  • 2 new drives are exhibiting identical behavior in Windows
  • Behavior persists when changing cables/SATA ports
  • I isolated a problem drive, removed it from the system, and bootup is back to normal, but drive is still not recognized.
  • I've had similar problems with hard drives on this computer, two 500GB drives from the initial build went bad 2 months apart, and these are the replacement drives.

So, I don't think its my hardware that's causing this, but what are the chances that two random drives from the same order will exhibit identical behavior and not be recognized by Windows?

This problem is particularly frustrating, since I'm relying on those drives for photo and video storage, and would like to avoid jumping through these hoops.

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Any chance of trying the drives in another system? –  Iszi Mar 15 '11 at 3:59
Is your PSU adequate for the task? –  Tog Mar 15 '11 at 8:27
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