HELP! Lost my work drive!!

I’m asking here because I never get any replies at the Computer/Hardware Forum AND its my Nuendo Drive.

I had a problem with the internal swap drive of my PC. I had an external dual bay drive dock and, as I was racing a deadline, I was trying to load a file quickly and NEEDED THAT DRIVE! I plugged in the external unit and it had changed the name of my AUDIO drive. When I opened it, it had the contents of the the drive in the external dock.

I shut down the PC, removed the drive and rebooted. Now that Audio( “:D”) drive is no longer accessible! It is no longer listed with the other drives! it is no longer listed in the BIOS, Device Mgr., or Disk management section! :open_mouth:

I’ve tried cold boots, system restore, tried to prompt it to return in safe mode, tried to find it in config mode and a bunch of other stuff. No luck. It’s an ADK PC and they’ve gone out of business. So, there’s no one to call for support. When this happens with an external drive, it’s a simple fix, just re-seat the USB connection. But this is an internal drive and I don’t know which drive is which. I’m also not sure how to re-seat the drives as all of the cables are hidden and the connections don’t look like typical SATA drive connections at the MOBO. I need to figure out how to identify the physical drive and re-assign the :d letter designation to it. Cause, right now, my work PC is now a “brick!”

Can anybody tell me how to get this drive to show up again? Thanks! :confused:

It’s a bit hard to follow what happened. If I’m getting it right you plugged in an external drive and when you did the internal :smiley: drive got messed up and now it no longer is listed anywhere, correct? And it’s an audio drive, not a system drive, right?

I have no idea why this would happen other than hardware failure of some sort. I’d simply open up the case and disconnect non-essential devices. To figure out which drive is which can be tricky if there isn’t proper documentation, but you should be able to at least exclude some things. If you can follow the cables it should be fairly easy to check the mobo documentation for layout and cross reference that with Disk Management listings. If you can’t then the next thing I’d look at is drive size. If your system drive is a different size then you at least know not to disconnect that one, and can try to disconnect the others and then reconnect one by one.

Swapping cables is again probably a good idea. Replace the power cable to the drive(s) and replace the data cable (again, if they’re “hidden” it might be an issue).

Come to think of it, how about you snap/share a picture of the internals, specifically cable run and connectors…? Might be easier for others to see what the problem could be.

Your understanding is correct. That is exactly what happened. My PC has a Front loading swap drive, that for some inexplicable reason decided to TEMPORARILY stop working (it’s working just fine now after causing all of this drama!).


Re-seating and rebooting several times failed to bring it back online. So I pulled out my BRAND NEW NEVER USED Thermaltake BlacX Duet HD Dock. I plugged it into the PC with the Swap Drive and a mostly empty one to copy the file. When I rebooted the PC, It showed my swap drive and the copy drive which had been assigned the D drive’s designation letter! Obviously, that is NOT a result I wanted. So, I immediately shut down and took that drive out, expecting the “real D drive” to return. Thus began the nightmare!

While recognizing what a problem I had the BlacX Dock just stopped working! The power wouldn’t stay on, so the swap drive couldn’t stay connected! I shut down, removed the dock and did my file transfer between 2 other external drives NOT meant for that purpose. I worked from those drives to make my deadline. Then I did a System restore, which took me back to May 19 status. I lost a ton of updates and my new Paragon Drive Cloning download that I’d just purchased 2 days ago. BUT ALL DRIVES CAME BACK ONLINE EXCEPT THE AUDIO DRIVE.

So, I reversed the System Restore. Paragon and all of my updates returned AND all of the drives remained in proper working order. But the Audio Drive did not return.

I sent out this distress call, then I shut down everything and unplugged it. My hope was that, this morning, a totally cold start, after re-seating EVERY drive connection to the MOBO would solve the problem and I could happily claim that the crisis was averted.


Sadly the problem remains! :angry: :cry:

Here’s the pic of the MOBO & Drive Bays.


The very top drive is the OS (C:) drive. The other 3 are identical Seagate 2TB drives. 1 is for the Sample Library, 1 is for Audio (where ALL of my Nuendo projects reside) and the last is for video. The swap drive imports projects and then backs them up upon completion.

I tracked it down and restored the Audio drive. I had to go by process of elimination to id the drives. But I found it. It turned out that the power cable for the audio drive had gotten disconnected. I assume this happened when I tried to insert another drive into a blank bay. But I never touched the other drives. So that’s my best guess. As this was the case, that would explain why the dock could appropriate that drive letter and assign it to the external drive.

Now, that I’ve had to go through them all to figure out which was which, I have placed very large ID stickers on each one. Trouble shooting SHOULD be much easier next time. All of this drama, because I was trying to be proactive by cloning my OS drive! :unamused:

Thanks Mattias, for trying to help me sort it out. Much appreciated! :smiley:

Glad you got it sorted.