I have a Windows Server 2003 box, with 2 identical hard drives installed (not in a RAID array).
For some reason, Windows just stopped recognising the second hard drive. It doesn’t appear in My Computer or Windows Disk Management. However, when booting the server up, if I go into my BIOS settings, the BIOS does pick up the hard drive.
What could be the problem? How do I troubleshoot this? Are there any free tools available that I can use to diagnose and fix this problem?
Answer
First thing I would do is boot up a Linux boot disk and see if the drive shows up in that. Then use smartmontools, “smartcrl -a /dev/sda” or /dev/sdb and see if the drive reports any Smart errors. If it does, then replace the drive, if no errors are found, have it run a full test on itself. “smartctl -t long /dev/sda.
If the drive itself is good, then it might be a file system issue.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Saajid Ismail , Answer Author : Porch
