Hard Drive Issue

[Darksider]

ok, so my E: storage drive doesn't seem to show up on my computer half the time anymore. Not sure what's causing this, could be a glitch with Windows itself (it's been a while since I reformatted and my computer is starting to get the rot) or it could be a problem with the HD itself, which is pretty old. Sometimes it shows up and runs fine without any problem, sometimes it doesn't show up on startup, and sometimes it shows up on startup and then dissapears with a popup in the taskbar that says "could not save volume "E:"."

Anyone have any idea what's causing this? If the disk is failing, what options do I have for recovering the data?

[Darksider]

Ok, nothing seems to be wrong with any of the files themselves, when I can see the drive, everything on it runs fine. Its just that most of the time, my computer can't seem to see the drive.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Have you checked the physical connections in the case? It could be that a wire to the drive in question is either wriggling back and forth, sometimes getting a good link and sometimes not (either power or data,) or it could be that the wires are starting to go ka-fuck on you.

It could also be a case of drive failure, or, as you said, one of the unpredictable symptoms of a long-life computer picking up quirks and faults that may or may not be eradicable with a format.

Remember, computer triage follows the path of cheapest-to-most-expensive to fix. In this case, the cheapest diagnosis is a wire wriggling loose which takes almost no time and zero resources to repair, followed by a wire being bad, followed by a hard drive pave and nuke (which, while cheaper than replacing a wire, has a higher opportunity cost in that you're gonna be a lot of time backing up all your data), and only then starting to consider that the drive itself is ker-flucked. Obviously, if you strongly suspect it's something more expensive, you should try that first.

[Darksider]

It's not a loose wire. I opened the case and checked, and everything is hooked up just fine.

Oddly enough, I managed to transfer or copy most of the HD's data to another hard drive that's newer and larger, and now it seems to be working fine. I'm probably going to just ditch it and get a new one since I can get a larger storage drive for less money than I paid for this one in the first place. The drive is almost seven years old, so it probably needs to be replaced anyways. I managed to get all the data off of it, so there's really nothing else I need it for.