Weird happenings with my WD Black 6 TB drive

[Daddyjaxx]

Anytime I restart my system. the drive is gone. BIOS doesn't see it and neither does Windows. If I shut down and restart, it's back. I've tried different SATA ports and it's the same. Do you think it's an issue with the drive or the BIOS? I don't know how long it has been happening, but I just started noticing it because I upgraded some SATA drivers. I thought it was the drivers, but that wouldn't explain the disappearing drive in the BIOS or that I did a restore of a backup file from two weeks ago. Dummy me deleted all the most recent backups of my OS drive, so I had to restore current versions of everything in my user folders too, especially the .pst file. This drive has all 300 GB of my music on it, but it is also on a USB drive, the one I restored from, my NAS drive, and worst comes to worst in the Apple Cloud. There is no way I'm losing all that data.

 

[Mpegger]

Did you try a different cable? I had a drive with a bad cable that would exhibit the same problem. Randomly disappearing at startup, or even during use.

Worst case scenario, the drive could be going bad. Does it seem to slow down or hang while accessing certain files? Have you done a full drive scan to see if there are any problems?

 

[Daddyjaxx]

Used different cable, different ports, different power cable. It works fine when it's there. No way I'm doing a full drive scan unless WD makes me. On a 6TB drive, that's like 12-14 hours. It's like if it powers down, it's fine. If there is still power to it on a restart, it's gone. I opened a case with WD. I would set it to power down in power settings, but it probably just powers up again at reboot. I'm not too concerned since it isn't my OS drive and my data is backed up in so many places, it would take really, really, REALLY, bad luck to lose it. I just love Acronis True Image....unless you cancel a backup in process and then it leaves a 50 GB file in the System Volume Information that you have to gain access to and delete.

 

[Beelost]

"Dummy me deleted all the most recent backups of my OS drive, so I had to restore current versions of everything in my user folders too, especially the .pst file. This drive has all 300 GB of my music on it, but it is also on a USB drive, the one I restored from, my NAS drive, and worst comes to worst in the Apple Cloud. "

How do you manage to restore everything??? Is there any program for backing up automatically? I recently lost all my music files and videos. And I don't have any back up. Last time I deleted my word files I used cleverfiles to recover them. And still I forget to back up.

 

[Daddyjaxx]

Yes, Acronis True Image 2017. You can store many backups. Have it run whenever you want, etc.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/

 

[Beelost]

Thanks for your quick answer. I'll try that