Storage Solutions Internal HDDs showing as removable; disappear.

[Kilroyquasar]

Hello,

In my desktop PC I have 5 internal storage-drives - 2 SSDs, and 3 HDDs. Two of the HDDs (both Seagate, 2TB & 1TB) have been showing up as removable drives, and over time am seeing that they quickly disappear from file explorer, disk management, device manager upon booting up the PC, and often upon restarting the PC too they don't appear again, nor does the BIOS-screen lists them under the 'SATA configuration' tab.

The PC's mobo is Asus P8Z77 V-Pro. The BIOS is the latest & last one. I have tried registry-edit & some other troubleshooting but to no avail (hot plug feature is also set to disabled in BIOS setup). Am now suspecting perhaps the HDDs might be failing, as its only these 2 Seagate drives which are affected. I have another WD 1TB drive and 2 SSDs inside which aren't.

Another thing is that for some reason the 'SATA configuration' window in BIOS doesn't list 2 of the SATA ports (the top 2 navy blue ones on this particular mobo, SATA6, 6GB/s ports). Could this be related to the HDD-issue somehow? However even if these 2 particular HDDs are connected to any other SATA ports on the mobo (even if with other SATA cables, just to rule out the possibility of faulty cables), they still exhibit the same behaviour.

Pls suggest what do you think. Am inclined to believe that the HDDs themselves are the culprits. Would try with some other HDD if I can find one & connect it in place of these & see what happens.

 

[nRiTeCh]

In bios theres some option like hot plug for storage when its enabled hard drives can be removed just like usb. Nothing harm in it and if you accidentally remove it, go back to device mgr and refresh the disk is back.

 

[dexterz]

It's the AHCI bios setting in Z77 iirc. I had the same issue with my Asrock Z77 where drives connected to secondary sata ports would show up as removable. Can also be addressed by changing registry settings.

 

[Kilroyquasar]

In bios theres some option like hot plug for storage when its enabled hard drives can be removed just like usb. Nothing harm in it and if you accidentally remove it, go back to device mgr and refresh the disk is back.

thanks. hot plugging is disabled by default, and I had enabled it once to check how it works. however doesn't really relate to the issue here.

It's the AHCI bios setting in Z77 iirc. I had the same issue with my Asrock Z77 where drives connected to secondary sata ports would show up as removable. Can also be addressed by changing registry settings.

thanks. now upon some further reading I realized that yes, its the ASMedia SATA ports here (the navy/dark blue ones which I had written about earlier) which are the real culprits! the usual 'registry-hack' that's recommended for the removable drive issue didn't work for me. but found several posts on the web informing that these two ports are inherently slower than the intel SATA ports on the motherboard, and people actually usually use them with optical drives (although officially the manual mentions them to be used with data drives only). in my case too, I found out that connecting the HDDs to these 2 ports would render them unusable - they aren't listed either in POST or in file explorer. by connected the boot-drive too to one of these ports, am not able to boot the PC. I have now connected the 2 said HDDs to two of the intel SATA ports and they are working fine now. Hence out of the 8 available SATA ports onboard, only 6 now seem really useable. I doubt whether my optical drives would work if connected to these two ports.
(and also that, these ASMedia SATA ports aren't listed in BIOS by default; only the intel ones are. it only needs to be ensured that the ASMedia Controller is set to 'enabled' under 'Onboard Devices Configuration' tab in BIOS.)