Storage Problems

Storage Problems

What to do when your hard disk is dying and your SSD is sputtering

Problem: Hard Drive Disappears

Solution: If it’s a drive that was previously visible, the first step is to see if the drive shows up in the BIOS (check under Boot). If not, swap out the SATA and/or power cables. If the drive shows up, run CHKDSK on it by right-clicking the drive in My Computer, choosing Properties, then the Tools tab, and then “Check now” and “Automatically fix file systems errors.” If the drive continues to give a ton of errors, and is behaving erratically but is visible in Windows, copy all data off it immediately if you can, or run Data Recovery on it STAT. If the drive is not visible in Windows, your options are limited to the Freezer Trick (an hour or so of extreme cold sometimes sets things straight) or expensive forensic-style data recovery.

If this is a brand-new drive that’s not showing up, you need to initialize it first. Right-click My Computer and select Manage, then Disk Management and follow the prompts.

Problem: Optical Drive Disappears

Solution: This classic conundrum involves either a missing drive or one that stops functioning suddenly. Put on your big-boy pants and type regedit in the Start menu search box, then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}. If you see an entry named UpperFilters, delete it. If you see an entry named LowerFilters, delete it. Once you’ve done this, exit Regedit and reboot your system. In most scenarios, your optical drive will reappear and/or magically begin working again. Note that you may have to reinstall software that accesses the optical drive (e.g., burning software) to get back to 100 percent functionality.

Problem: Drive Not Reporting Full Capacity

Solution: This is usually an issue with 3TB or 4TB drives, as 2TB drives should have zero issues in Win7 (WinXP users might have to download a utility from the drive’s manufacturer to allow for a drive with 4K sectors). Out of the box these 3/4TB drives are typically MBR disks, which limits a partition to 2TB (actually, 1.8TB or so) relegating the rest to a separate partition. If you want the full capacity in one partition, you need to convert the disk to GPT. To do this, type cmd at the Start search box; at the prompt type diskpart, then list disk, then select disk X (substituting X for your drive number), then convert GPT. Now go to Disk Management and create your massive single partition.

Problem: SSD Performance Is Slow

Solution: If you’re using a hard drive and it feels slow, don’t worry; that’s how they are for the most part. If you’re using an SSD and its slow, there is a problem. If you’re not sure if it’s slower than spec, downloadCrystalDiskMark and see what kind of sequential-read/write speeds you are getting. Second, make sure the drive is connected to the native SATA 6Gb/s ports on the motherboard. You can’t rely on color, only your mobo manual, to tell. Third, go into the BIOS and make sure the SATA port for that drive is set to AHCI mode instead of IDE mode, as that will usually give you better performance.

Problem: AHCI Causes BSOD (blue screen of death)

Solution: Sometimes, people install Windows 7 without AHCI enabled, only to find out that enabling it after the install causes a BSOD. To fix this, you have to edit the registry. Press Windows + R key, type regedit, then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci. Then right-click the word Start on the right-side and click Modify. Change the value in the window to “0” and click OK. Exit Regedit, reboot the system, and change your SATA controller to AHCI; you will boot right into Windows.