Disappearing harddrives (1 Viewer)

[Denny Oubidoux]

i have two harddrives in my computer, i use the second one mostly for recording onto. lately the second one disappears from "my computer" seemingly at random, sometimes its not there when I boot up and sometimes i'll be recording away and suddenly i get a message that the path i'm saving to is invalid and it turns out the d drive has gone awol again. is this likely to be something not too worrying or can i expect to have it not work at all again one of these days?

just there a minute ago i got a message saying " new hard disc found, your new hardware is ready to use" but i havent stuck anything on and of course my d drive is nowhere to be found...

 

[zebra heart attack]

sounds a bit iffy. make sure your ide/power cables are pushed in fully into the hardrive. other than that there's not much that can be done to fix dodgy drives.

 

[Rogue]

what he said.

also, have you tried googling your hard-drive to see if it pops up on any other forums, could be a fault with that make or batch that someone has a workaround for...


ps: could also be a lunar-phase thing, my external is also playing silly buggers at the moment by refusing to allow disconnection

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

hmmm, i think i'd better get a new external hard drive too to stick the d drive stuff onto before it goes altogether. i havent got the time or the patience to be backing up 60 gigs of stuff on to cdrs.

is it the case that the bigger the harddrive the more likely it is to fuck up on you? and i see some of the external harddrives have 8MB buffers and some have 16MB - what does that mean?

do any of the muso people know off the top of their heads are external harddrives any good for storing samples for use in softsampler things or would there be too much latency?

and what is it i'd need more of to be able to run more plugins and stuff?

any recommendations?

thanks!

 

[hanley]

do any of the muso people know off the top of their heads are external harddrives any good for storing samples for use in softsampler things or would there be too much latency?

and what is it i'd need more of to be able to run more plugins and stuff?

any recommendations?

thanks!

not too sure about bigger harddrives fucking up
as for running more plugins adding more ram would prob be the best thing.more ram you have the more things you can do at the same time. also id imagine softsamplers would have loaded samples/wavs into ram while its being used.
you could use a bit of software like everest home to find out what kind of ram is in your system or used a memory finder outer, think theres one on this page.

could you not just buy a normal hard drive and stick it into your computer?would work out cheeper than and external drive

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

not too sure about bigger harddrives fucking up
as for running more plugins adding more ram would prob be the best thing.more ram you have the more things you can do at the same time. also id imagine softsamplers would have loaded samples/wavs into ram while its being used.
you could use a bit of software like everest home to find out what kind of ram is in your system or used a memory finder outer, think theres one on this page.

could you not just buy a normal hard drive and stick it into your computer?would work out cheeper than and external drive

thanks for that,
i suppose i could just buy a huge normal hard drive but i have the idea in my head that bigger drives will go bad quicker. maybe its a mistake to compare harddrives to blank tapes. also, i think i'd like to have the internal harddrive just for audio and keep all the other stuff elsewhere.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

i got a new hard drive as my second drive before christmas from komplett.ie but just got around to installing it about 5 minutes ago. should it just work straight off? I got a message saying "new hardware found" "hard drive", but then in "my computer" there was no sign of it so i opened up partition magic and it was in there marked as "unallocated". So i made a logical ntfs partition of 20GB and thats there in "my computer" now... is that the normal way to make it usable? and is logical the type i need (as opposed to primary?)

also, the new harddrive has no back on it and you can see a circuit board and some electronics stuff... it was in a sealed clear plastic bag when i got it and i saw that you could see the circuit boards and stuff but it was only there just now that i though this might be odd when i took out the old one and saw that it had metal covers on the 2 sides.

also this new one is supposed to be 250GB, it says so on it, but in partition magic it says that the partition i made is 20,000MB (thats 20Gigs right?) and that i have 111,000MB left unallocated, which i calulate to be 111GB giving me a total of 131Gigs for a 250 gig drive. am i missing something or does something seem off?

thanks

 

[Wavioli]

i have two harddrives in my computer, i use the second one mostly for recording onto. lately the second one disappears from "my computer" seemingly at random, sometimes its not there when I boot up and sometimes i'll be recording away and suddenly i get a message that the path i'm saving to is invalid and it turns out the d drive has gone awol again. is this likely to be something not too worrying or can i expect to have it not work at all again one of these days?

just there a minute ago i got a message saying " new hard disc found, your new hardware is ready to use" but i havent stuck anything on and of course my d drive is nowhere to be found...

man, I think you need a new computer, theres something wrong with it every facking day like.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

man, I think you need a new computer, theres something wrong with it every facking day like.

its more likely just that i havent a clue and should keep away from it.

ooh heres the edit button again... anyway, im dealing with those first issues.

 

[hanley]

i got a new hard drive as my second drive before christmas from komplett.ie but just got around to installing it about 5 minutes ago. should it just work straight off? I got a message saying "new hardware found" "hard drive", but then in "my computer" there was no sign of it so i opened up partition magic and it was in there marked as "unallocated". So i made a logical ntfs partition of 20GB and thats there in "my computer" now... is that the normal way to make it usable? and is logical the type i need (as opposed to primary?)

also, the new harddrive has no back on it and you can see a circuit board and some electronics stuff... it was in a sealed clear plastic bag when i got it and i saw that you could see the circuit boards and stuff but it was only there just now that i though this might be odd when i took out the old one and saw that it had metal covers on the 2 sides.

also this new one is supposed to be 250GB, it says so on it, but in partition magic it says that the partition i made is 20,000MB (thats 20Gigs right?) and that i have 111,000MB left unallocated, which i calulate to be 111GB giving me a total of 131Gigs for a 250 gig drive. am i missing something or does something seem off?

thanks

as for the no back on the hd/seeing some circuits, think that is the norm.

i think a 250gb harddrive formatted should give you around 230 something gb.does sound like its formatted oddly.
if you right click on my computer, click on manage then click on disk managment it should show you the formatted/not formatted space on your HD's.,might give you an idea there

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

as for the no back on the hd/seeing some circuits, think that is the norm.

i think a 250gb harddrive formatted should give you around 230 something gb.does sound like its formatted oddly.
if you right click on my computer, click on manage then click on disk managment it should show you the formatted/not formatted space on your HD's.,might give you an idea there

thanks, hanley. Only the formatted part of the new drive shows up, theres no mention at all of the rest of the drive in "my computer" anywhere. Partition magic does show the unformatted part but its saying the maximum possible size is 131,000MB. Am i right in thinking it should be up around 230,000mb for a 250gb drive? im thinking i might have to send it back but i know if i do that then it'll turn out im being silly....

 

[hanley]

have you tried to format the unpartitioned bit?

what make of harddrive is it? there might be some software on their website for formatting their drives.

only other thing i could think of is using boot floppy disk or a win xp install cd to format.but dunno if that will help at all actually

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

i found out that the reason only 127gb of the 250gb was showing up was because i didnt have servicepack 1 installed. apparently you need it for drives over 127gb in size. i installed it and its working fine now. !ninjaaaa

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

its working fine now. !ninjaaaa

well holy GOD. if its not one feckin thing....

you know those IDE cable things that you run from a socket in the main part of the computer out to your harddrive and then onto your cd/dvd drive? well, are the ones that have one little box thats inactive (for the want of a better term) different to the ones that have all the boxes active?

just as i got everything sorted i broke the cable on my second drive and selotape wasnt doing any good so i bought a new one in maplins that says "IDE Hard Disk Cable" and it has no little inactive box like the old cable had. when i put in the new one the computer failed to recognize any primary or secondary master or slave drives but when i took it out again the primary master and slave were back as normal. if i swapped the cable over to the other drives they worked normally too, its only this new cable thats giving me gout. i asked in petes on parnell st about it today (there was a big queue in maplins) and the guy said this should make no difference at all as theres no little pin on the harddrives for the extra active square box to fit onto so it may as well be an inactive one so i did more fidgeting at it this evening but no luck except with the old lead.

so im thinking now there must be some difference with these cables...?

 

[hanley]

you sure it was an ide cable you got? think there some other newer kind.ata, have never seen them as my computers old.

you should have two IDE connectors on your motherboard.are you using both of them? you could try putting you main harddrive on the first one of them and you second harddrive and CD-ROM on the second.

could be a problem with the jumper thing on the drive too. think if you have two drives (disks or optical drives) on one IDE cable the one at the end goes to slave and the one in the middle is master

although you prob should check google or ask someone as it was a year or so ago i was going through this kinda shit

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

you sure it was an ide cable you got? think there some other newer kind.ata, have never seen them as my computers old.

you should have two IDE connectors on your motherboard.are you using both of them? you could try putting you main harddrive on the first one of them and you second harddrive and CD-ROM on the second.

could be a problem with the jumper thing on the drive too. think if you have two drives (disks or optical drives) on one IDE cable the one at the end goes to slave and the one in the middle is master

although you prob should check google or ask someone as it was a year or so ago i was going through this kinda shit

it said on the label that its an ide cable for harddisk drives, and it fits and looks almost the same as the old lead i had except that that theres spaces for 40pins instead of the 39 that the old cables could take (see! ive been finding stuff out!) and these new ones dont work. i went looking for the 39 hole cables but couldnt find any. im giving up now for a few days in case i throw the damn thing out the window.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

m giving up now for a few days in case i throw the damn thing out the window.

i have it fixed again. i found this site about connecting ide stuff. not sure i have it done in the most efficient way but i'll worry about that later.
.|..|

im still confused about editing posts in here.
sometimes you can and sometimes you cant...