Another episode of my hard drive follies. This has nothing to do with a RAID controller, but the Silicon Image SataLink controller that this drive was connected to may have been part of the problem. I'm posting this because the topic is close enough to this one that it didn't seem to merit a new thread.
After cleaning and doing some minor repairs on my HTPC, neither of my external drives appeared on the SI BIOS screen, and when I attempted to play a movie from one of the drives, everything froze and I had to do a forced restart. Subsequent attempts to play movie files met with the same results. I then tried a video file from the other drive and it played okay, until I tried another and it caused everything to freeze as before.
Wanting to cross check, I swapped the drives out to my desktop, and found that the MaxPower card saw both of them as it should have, and all of the monitors and diagnostics saw them both properly, except Disk Management. It sees the drive, but doesn't list any drive letter or other data as it should. Even though DM didn't say anything about the drive needing to be initialized, I clicked the context menu on it to see if I could add a drive letter to it. That resulted in the error dialog below. I tried to refresh and reboot as suggested, but that error continues to pop up.
Acronis DDS does see the drive's letter and disk information, but I didn't want to mess with it until I better understood the situation, for fear of messing things up further.
I ran a benchmark and error scan with HD Tune, and while the benchmark was "okay", it did drop off a bit more steeply than before, and the seek time was longer, and I think the CPU Utilization was higher also (see below). The error scan produced no bad sectors, and the speed map was typical with no slow blocks. However when I selected for HD Tune to scan the files, it said that there were none (of course the file managers don't see the drive at all, since it doesn't seem to have a drive letter, as far as Windows is concerned).
I have a hunch that the controller card went on the fritz and took the drive down with it, but now I'm trying to figure whether the drive is usable and whether I can salvage the data on it, before doing anything destructive...any ideas?
