Disk Drive disappears repeatedly. Must reboot and "Load Optimized Defaults" in BIOS to bring it back.

codypendzich

Prominent
Oct 25, 2017
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A few weeks ago I began having problems with my ASUS ROG GL502VS Laptop. My PC was running extremely slow, so I decided to reboot. It was about 15-20 minutes later and the PC seemed stuck in the reboot process, so I forced shutdown.

Upon rebooting, the PC hung at the ASUS ROG Splash Screen for about 30 minutes. I restarted again, and it hung for about 45 minutes. (I let it go while I was trying to research possible solutions.)

Eventually I came across a blue screen error. (Something about a drive missing or inaccessible. I thought this was fixed, so I don't have the error anymore.)

In researching, I tried to reseat the hard drives, rebooted, and still had the same issue. I ultimately decided to run a repair on Windows from a repair USB. This ran overnight (took about 22 hours), and the computer ran fine for a week afterwards.

During a reboot the following weekend, it did the same thing. This time, the repair only took a couple hours.

It had worked for about a day after that and then the D:\ drive randomly disappeared. (I noticed my desktop, which I relocated to D:\Libraries\ was now missing.)

I then decided to try swapping out the old drive for a Samsung 840 Evo SSD I had in my desktop, as the Event Viewer was reporting many disk errors.

About a day or two later the same thing happened, and has continued to happen every day or two. The drive will randomly disappear. Rebooting doesn't bring the drive back, but if I reboot to BIOS with F2, Load Optimized Defaults with F9, and then Save and Exit with F10, the drive comes back.

My friend suggested this could be a bad SATA controller, and that I could be risking my Samsung drive by continuing to use it in this state. Is there merit to this? Is it likely, or possible that something else is happening?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, and I'm happy to provide more info if helpful.