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My old PSU was giving me problems so I swapped it out for a Corsair AX-750.

Everything ALMOST went smoothly, until I flipped on the machine and tried to boot.

The JMicron controller on my EVGA X58 ended up hanging when it was checking the hard drives that were connected to it (I am not using it as a RAID, I just have hard drives connected to it). After I restarted, it went through, but one of my hard drives wouldn't show up (it's a Seagate 1TB Barracuda - and yes it's the infamous 7200.11, and yes I've already had it RMA'd once). Windows 7 won't see it either. (It's not showing up unformatted or ANYTHING in the Disk Management snap-pin). This hard drive was working totally fine an hour before I swapped out the PSU.

I already tried troubleshooting it a bit. Hooked it up to the Intel controller, used different SATA cables, checked the connections. The hard drive would hang on the JMicron controller, but if I hook it up to the Intel controller, the PC gets stuck in the BIOS for a good 10 seconds longer than it normally does (it DOES see the HD though), then resumes the startup sequence. When it reaches Windows, Windows hangs a bit right at startup (I know this symptom is usually the sign of a hard drive that is dying), then proceeds. When I get to the desktop, the hard drive is nowhere to be seen, nor is it in Disk Management.

My suspicion is whatever I did while I was swapping out the PSU fried the PCB/controller/electronics on the HD, as I hear it spinning up without any problems or clicks.

I'm ready to throw this thing in the freezer to try to get it to work again, but I'd like to get your opinion on this before I do something drastic (and yes, I've done the freezer trick with the previous 7200.11 to rescue the data from it before RMAing it). Any ideas?

Edit: I also tried hooking the hard drive up to a Thermaltake BlacX USB Docking Station that I haven't opened since I bought a year ago. Although the Docking Station is half-broken (power LED won't light up and hard drive won't appear), I DO hear the hard drive spinning up when I hook up the Seagate to it. Tried some other known good hard drives and same thing - they all spin up, so I'm pretty sure it's not an incompatible PSU issue.

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  • put the old one back in see if it sees the hard drive. change them back and forth to confirm that the hdd isn't recognised with the new PSU. Other than that if you don't like the old PSU, you need some other new PSUs to test with.
    – barlop
    Sep 16, 2011 at 10:06
  • @barlop Yeah, I was thinking of doing that, but I spent so much freaking time hooking this computer up to the PSU (cable management nightmare) that I'm way too exhausted to go back to the old one. Like I said, however, I do hear the hard drive spinning up, and it DOES show up in the BIOS (if I connect it to the Intel controller). I even tried hooking it up to a BlacX USB Docking Station - I can hear it spinning up through that too. I'll try the PSU regardless. By the way, the old one is a Zalman 1000-HP, while the new one is a Corsair AX750. Sep 16, 2011 at 10:08

1 Answer 1

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it'll spin up as long as there's power to the drive. It dosen't indicate data connections are working fine. The drive showing up in bios hints that its probably fine logically and electronically. I'd try an alternate OS (say linux) to see if the device is visible and can be copied, running something like ddrescue, or mounting it with a plain vanilla linux mount and copy to get the data out, wiping the drive, and transferring the data back in

I've seen drives disappear in windows, and be visible in linux

drive checking for me - i'm using a xubuntu liveusb made with unetbootin

sudo lshw

look for a line similar to this

 *-disk
                description: ATA Disk
                product: Hitachi HDS72105
                vendor: Hitachi
                physical id: 0
                bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
                logical name: /dev/sda
                version: JP2O
                serial: JP8512JE0ZH0KV
                size: 465GiB (500GB)
                capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
                configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=32445df5
              *-volume:0
                   description: Windows NTFS volume
                   physical id: 1
                   bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1
                   logical name: /dev/sda1
                   version: 3.1
                   serial: 725a-88d1
                   size: 348MiB
                   capacity: 350MiB
                   capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized
                   configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-09-14 18:23:08 filesystem=ntfs label=System Reserved modified_by_chkdsk=true mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=dirty upgrade_on_mount=true
              *-volume:1
                   description: Windows NTFS volume
                   physical id: 2
                   bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2
                   logical name: /dev/sda2
                   version: 3.1
                   serial: c2080d08-5d9a-ea48-8c69-74d4f5a8170e
                   size: 97GiB
                   capacity: 97GiB
                   capabilities: primary ntfs initialized
                   configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2011-09-14 18:23:23 filesystem=ntfs state=clean

this should indicate the drive is detected - here i have a drive sda with two partitions called sda1 and sda2.

i would then try mounting the drive (if it isn't already) to copy out files, and install and check it with gsmartcontrol (installable via the standard repos) to check the drive's health

full guide to dd here - you can use a /media/foo/desination.img rather than the full location they have used- but you need a large enough drive to back it up to

Assuming i want to DD rescue sda1ddrescue should be invoked as

dd_rescue /dev/sda1 /path/to/destination.img

where sda1 is the drive you want to image, and destination is the destination

I am not sure if you can check the drive, but you should be able to mount the image with

mount /path/to/destination.img /mnt/recoverydata

and see if there's data there

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  • @Journeyman_Geek It shows up in the BIOS, but the BIOS hangs for 10 seconds longer than usual if that drive's plugged in (which from my experience means something's going on with the drive). Windows also hangs on the drive during startup while the Windows logo is animating. I'm not terribly experienced with Linux, so I'm not sure where to start with ddrescue - should I use unetbootin to make a USB flashdrive Debian bootdisk and run ddrescue off of that? Sep 16, 2011 at 10:38
  • adding that. could be a few edits
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 16, 2011 at 11:29
  • edits done. I think
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 16, 2011 at 11:36
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    that also means the problem is just data - you can do a drive health test with gsmartcontrol (which also runs on windows), wipe the drive if there's nothing else there, and probably use it. I've had the exact same scenario (with someone elses drive), and it wasn't as fun as i hoped since the drive turned up on linux automatically. For wiping drives, just use the shred command
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 17, 2011 at 1:53
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    Try swapping the PSU. That particular model is screwy as hell, so if you have the same problem with a different PSU, or if seatools finds something RMAable, RMA it. It sounds a little like the drive is in the first stages of dropping dead to me.Also, what does gsnartcontrol say about it?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 18, 2011 at 23:00

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