S
Stewart Berman
Windows XP SP3 with all patches
ASUS AN32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
ASUS SLI driver installed.
Power Scheme: Power off drives: Never
I had a large number of drives attached to this system so most of the possible drive letters are
taken.
I recently acquired three Wester Digital My Book Studio Edition 750GB triple attachment (USB2,
Firewire and eSata) drives.
I hooked up two using USB ports and one using the eSata connection on the rear of the motherboard.
I formatted the drives using NTFS and attached the one on the eSata connection as Z:. The others
were not assigned drive letters. I left the system unattended for a number of hours and when I got
back there was a popup message that the system was unable to write to Z:\$Mft and the Z: drive was
gone. It did not show up in device manager. I rebooted the system and it came back.
I did some testing but could find nothing wrong so I changed the drive letter to Y: because I have
an overnight copy of one of my video storage drives to Y: and I thought that would be a good test.
I then connected one of the USB drives as Z:.
The next day there was the same popup message that the system could not write to Z:\$Mft. The drive
shows in Explorer but if I try to create a folder on it the system says:
---------------------------
Unable to create folder
---------------------------
Unable to create the folder 'New Folder'
The system cannot find the file specified.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
The drive shows up in device manager and if I double click on the properties form opens and says the
drive is working properly and that it is enabled.
The drive does not show up in drive management. Drive 6 (which is where the drive should be) is
missing. The listing goes from Drive 0 to 5 and then 6 and up.
The system log has a series of these errors:
The device, \Device\Scsi\SI31321, did not respond within the timeout period.
It also has these warnings:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk6\D during a paging operation. (Not sure what this
means as pagefile.sys is on Disk 0 per disk manager and it also shows up for Harddisk4.)
{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file . The data has been
lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please
try to save this file elsewhere.
And these information messages:
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the
file Z:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer
hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the
file Z:\. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or
network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
The drive shows up in Safely Remove Hardware but it can't be removed.
Finally, I powered the drive off and then on and now it is usable and shows up in drive management
as Drive 6.
The drive passes the WD diagnostics test.
Normally, I would say it was a bad drive but this has happened with two different drives -- one on
an eSata port and one on a USB port but both when attached as Z:.
Any idea what would cause a drive to vanish in this way would be appreciated.
ASUS AN32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
ASUS SLI driver installed.
Power Scheme: Power off drives: Never
I had a large number of drives attached to this system so most of the possible drive letters are
taken.
I recently acquired three Wester Digital My Book Studio Edition 750GB triple attachment (USB2,
Firewire and eSata) drives.
I hooked up two using USB ports and one using the eSata connection on the rear of the motherboard.
I formatted the drives using NTFS and attached the one on the eSata connection as Z:. The others
were not assigned drive letters. I left the system unattended for a number of hours and when I got
back there was a popup message that the system was unable to write to Z:\$Mft and the Z: drive was
gone. It did not show up in device manager. I rebooted the system and it came back.
I did some testing but could find nothing wrong so I changed the drive letter to Y: because I have
an overnight copy of one of my video storage drives to Y: and I thought that would be a good test.
I then connected one of the USB drives as Z:.
The next day there was the same popup message that the system could not write to Z:\$Mft. The drive
shows in Explorer but if I try to create a folder on it the system says:
---------------------------
Unable to create folder
---------------------------
Unable to create the folder 'New Folder'
The system cannot find the file specified.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
The drive shows up in device manager and if I double click on the properties form opens and says the
drive is working properly and that it is enabled.
The drive does not show up in drive management. Drive 6 (which is where the drive should be) is
missing. The listing goes from Drive 0 to 5 and then 6 and up.
The system log has a series of these errors:
The device, \Device\Scsi\SI31321, did not respond within the timeout period.
It also has these warnings:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk6\D during a paging operation. (Not sure what this
means as pagefile.sys is on Disk 0 per disk manager and it also shows up for Harddisk4.)
{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file . The data has been
lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please
try to save this file elsewhere.
And these information messages:
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the
file Z:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer
hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the
file Z:\. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or
network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
The drive shows up in Safely Remove Hardware but it can't be removed.
Finally, I powered the drive off and then on and now it is usable and shows up in drive management
as Drive 6.
The drive passes the WD diagnostics test.
Normally, I would say it was a bad drive but this has happened with two different drives -- one on
an eSata port and one on a USB port but both when attached as Z:.
Any idea what would cause a drive to vanish in this way would be appreciated.