Windows 10: Hard Drive Gone Missing

One of my secondary hard drives went missing this morning. Been using it for more than a year on this Desktop PC. Opened Disk Management expecting it just had to be reestablished, which has happened before, but it wasn't there. Rescan didn't help. Can you?

:)

 

Why did the startup window get cleared?

I didn't missed any step, the list was gone and gone , even after using lot of programs the programs were not listed in that list.

 

hard drive gone missing

so I have 2 hard drives of the same model

one of them I have been using just fine, so recently I decided it was time for a fresh install of Vista, and I opted to install in AHCI mode this time.

I was one of the early adopters, so I have Vista disk w/o SP1

when I got done installing, everything seems fine, hard drives shows up.

so I went ahead and installed SP1 and other updates
after restart, my hard drive went missing. *Confused

then I plugged in another fresh drive of the same model, just to make sure it is not dead.
the fresh drive has the same problem too.

here is all 3 of my hard drives showing up in BIOS




and here is the fresh drive with unallocated space showing up




formatting....




after about 30 seconds




gone, just like that.


hardware:
Mobo: Asus P5Q Pro Bios - 2102
Hard Drive: WD4000YR-01PLB0

software:
Vista home premium 64 bit

I've installed the following from Asus support site:
- Intel(R) P45/ICH10R Chipset Software Installation Utility WHQL V9.0.0.1009
- Marvell 88SE6111 SATA Controller Driver V1.2.0.60

but didn't work.

seems like I have 2 options, format and run in EIDE mode, or again, format and do w/o SP1

 

Hard Drive Space Missing

Hi,

It is possible that hard drive space was missing due to a corrupted file system. To better assist you, kindly answer the following questions:

• Have you made any recent changes prior to this issue?
• Have you tried deleting temporary files?
• What troubleshooting steps have you done so far aside from checked the hidden files?

We're looking forward to your response.