HDD Disappears after sleep mode

Question

I recently purchased a HDD and it works fine except if I go into sleep mode. Every time my computers comes out of sleep mode the HDD disappears completely. I have literally tried EVERYTHING to fix this, including:

• Changing SATA mode to IDE, AHCI, and RAID
• Changing sleep mode (ACPI mode) from Auto to S3
• Switching the SATA port on the motherboard
• Restoring BIOS to default settings
• Installing Microsoft update KB977178 (Apparently its already installed with SP1)
• Updating BIOS firmware
• Updating Intel Chipset drivers (Seems to be up to date already)
• Enabling hibernate mode
• Changing advanced power settings (Setting turn off hard disk after to 0 (never), 20, and 140 minutes)
• Disabling write caching on the hard drive
• And probably many more things during my 9 hour attempt at fixing this today

I also tried phoning my HDD's manufacturer (Hitachi) as well and they couldnt provide an answer. The hard drive seems to be OK and not showing any bad sectors. The only way the HDD will be detected is if I restart Windows completely.

Here are my system specs:

• Windows 7 (x64) SP1
• ASUS P6T Motherboard
• Seagate SATA 320GB Hard Drive (Primary)
• Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 SATA3 2TB (Secondary / The one thats not being detected)

Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

Solution

My first thought would be to say it's the drive, as they are notoriously crappy drives.

Check this out from NewEgg's feedback section on the drive:

Cons: Vista OS. It worked fine when initially plugged in, but it would not recover after the computer was put to sleep. Upon wake up, the drive would not appear in Explorer. It would reappear again after a reboot but would disappear after a sleep cycle. I wanted the drive to store Media files from Vista Media Center which goes to sleep when not in use. Returned it and bought a Western Digital.

But, you mention you upgraded the chipset drivers, but

1. Did you get them from Asus or Intel? Hit Intel's site and grab the latest version offered by them (currently v9.3.0.1019).

2. Did you update the drivers for the HDD controller itself?

That board also has two different SATA HDD controllers on it, an Intel Matrix Storage controller, and a JMicron.

So hook it to the Intel SATA ports and hit Intel's site to grab the latest Matrix Storage Manager/drivers (which have been renamed to the "Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver").

Here's a direct link to v11.1.0.1006 of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver from March of this year.

Comments

[BJ292]

I had a similar issue with an Acer desktop. My secondary hard drive would not be detected after sleep. In my case changing from AHCI to Native IDE fixed the problem. Did require a re-install of Win 7. Seems a common issue based on google search results. Possible suggestion was that drive was taking too long to spin up which led to it timing out - only seemed to happen to me when PC had been sleeping for some time - if only sleeping for 10/20 minutes everything worked ok.