vanishing hard drive

G’day,

I placed this in the network area but I can't see it being a network issue in the normal sense of networks.

I have a most weird problem that recently occurred. Never had this issue before. Relevant PCs are Win10.

I have 5 hard drives on computer A each with multiple partitions. I have a home networked laptop I’ll call computer B.

When I am using B and send a 3 gig file via the network to A it begins OK and gets about halfway through and then fails. So I am sending from A to B.

The transfer fails because the destination hard drive on A vanishes when actually viewed from A. The only way I can get it back is to reboot A.

Next I tried the reverse direction and when working from A I accessed B via the network and began retrieving a file from B. So I am now pulling a file across from B to A. Once again part way through my coping process it fails and again I have lost the same hard drive on A and must reboot to get it back.

I immediately thought hard drive fault. It is a WD black/caviar 2TB and 1 year old. I ran the WD diagnostics without issue. Ditto Win10 diags.

The next obvious thing to do was copy locally on A. So I chose a bunch of PST files (about 20 gigs total) on another hard drive on A and copied them to the failing hard drive on A. That worked perfectly.

I figure I do not have a hard drive issue. The issue is only when transferring files over my network. Smaller files work OK. Once above about 1 gig the transfers fail.

Sure, network issues are common. Anyone can have network headaches. What I cannot fathom though is how a home network file transfer can disable a hard drive on the destination PC.

It is not relevant but the destination hard drive contains 4 partitions G: H: I: J: and I am writing to H: All 4 vanish as if that hard drive was unplugged.

Thanks Denis,

I am an old Norton fan from DOS days... however I did both PCs as Win10 clean installs so there is no Norton history.

Equally this issue has not existed since those OS installs until quite recently. I can't be sure when it arose as I don't regularly run the batch file to copy the PST files from laptop to desktop that is now failing.

The only thing that I know that has changed have been Win10 updates... and it is easy to blame them as they have hiccup history.

Trev

Windows 10 has settings to limit data transfers over a metered connection.

I'm guessing here but perhaps Windows 10 also has some obscure settings to limit data transfers among networked computers as well.

JackHughs

Interesting thought Jack, but if so one may expect that to occur in a more controlled manner.

For the transfer instigating PC to lose its own hard drive seems a bit drastic. By lose I mean is no longer accessible or visible in Explorer and cannot be recovered without a reboot.

Trev

Have you tried transferring the 3 gig file to another physical hard drive on A?

Jackughs

Yes Jack, I had tried a 3 gig file from B to A to another physical drive early this morning and it worked OK. So then I tried again with a full compliment of PST files or about 20 gigs and that worked OK too. Let's call the A known good physical drive #3 and the A suss drive physical #2.

The above test again points the finger at #2. Remember though I had previously run WD diags on #2 and also copied a few gigs from #3 to #2 seemingly calling it OK.

Next I did 2 things. I repeated the 20 gig copying from #3 to #2 and sat watching. It was of course much faster than between PCs over the network. The whole transfer took about 7 minutes but quite oddly it stalled 2 or 3 times. Watching the transfer rate on Explorer it was belting along at a steady speed and then slowed, like a car braking over a few seconds, to a complete stop. There were zero transfers for as long as 30 seconds before it sped up again.

After that weird experience I decided to run the WD diags extended testing on #2. That ran for 3 hours 25 minutes.... and with zero errors. So the WD diags can't fault the drive. Copying between drives has weird lengthy pauses and copying via the network causes drive #2 to vanish.

Trev

Goodmorning,

If this were my machine, I would simply replace Drive 2. Regardless of the WD test results, Drive 2 is actually failing in real time for some reason. At this point, I would be worried about experiencing a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure.

JackHughs