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Hard drive lost its formatting

J

JJ Johnson

Gawd
Joined
Jun 26, 2008
Messages
802
I've never seen this before, but on my home file server running Windows 2008 R2, the other day Windows suddenly claimed that one of the hard drives is not formatted. The server is configured JBOD, and this particular drive was on the motherboard's native controller.

Everything looks OK from a hardware perspective. No SMART errors or warnings. The drive didn't disappear and come back. It just *poof* became unformatted. I pulled the drive and placed it on a different port, but had no luck getting it back. The data on it was either unimportant or easily replaced, so I did a (fast) reformat and so far I've copied about 150GB of files to it. I'll use it sparingly while keeping an eye on it, before filling it up again.

Any ideas what may have happened?
 
I've had this happen to a couple different drives in the past.

I would not trust that drive at all. Every time I reformatted a drive that lost it's formatting, the same thing happened a short while later. It could be hours, days, or weeks till it goes poof again, but it will happen.
 
I agree with cyclone3d and I wouldn't trust it. It's possible that the drive has internal problems even if it passes S.M.A.R.T. tests, etc.
 
drescherjm said:
Is this a drive that is > 2TB? And you just wrote past the 2TB spot?
Click to expand...

It's a 4TB drive, but I don't recall how much data that was on it. I also have several 3TB drives on the same system, same controller, well over the 2TB mark and haven't had any issues with them.
 
This has just happened to a second drive in the same system. In exactly the same way. At first, Windows reported some of the directories were corrupted, though most were still fine. I rebooted the machine and now it reports that the drive is unformatted.

I'm convinced it's not a hard drive problem ... Question is: What exactly is happening?
 
Again either the drive is bad (strange that it has no SMART errors - are you looking at the raw SMART with a program like CrystalDiskInfo - the full drive SMART pass / fail is useless and hd vendor drive utilities tell you a bad drive is fine?) or you wrote past the 2TB mark and it is on a controller that does not support 2TB (you may have more than 1 controller in your PC). Always full format every drive you add to your system to prevent this.
 
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JJ Johnson said:
It's a 4TB drive, but I don't recall how much data that was on it. I also have several 3TB drives on the same system, same controller, well over the 2TB mark and haven't had any issues with them.
Click to expand...

What type of controller?
 
omniscence said:
What type of controller?
Click to expand...

It's the onboard controller of the Tyan S5211G2NR motherboard. LGA775 CPU, with Intel 3210 chipset and ICH9R southbridge. Windows shows the 3 and 4TB drives as having their correct capacities, FWIW.
 
JJ Johnson said:
It's the onboard controller of the Tyan S5211G2NR motherboard. LGA775 CPU, with Intel 3210 chipset and ICH9R southbridge. Windows shows the 3 and 4TB drives as having their correct capacities, FWIW.
Click to expand...
Are you running in AHCI mode? Are you using the Intel storage drivers or Windows drivers?
 
Yes, it's in AHCI mode. Not using any type of onboard or software RAID. According to Device Manager, I'm using Windows drivers.
 
Could be a possible controller driver issue. You can try to use IRST drivers to find out if the issue still persists.
 
The problem actually ended up being Intel drivers that I had loaded earlier this summer when I switched the motherboard over to AHCI. The problem was, indeed, the 2TB limit. Anything written over that would begin corrupting the file system with nothing more than some event log entries about NTFS errors and attempts to repair the damage. Apparently Windows would silent try to 'fix' the problem until, eventually, the drive was completely unrecoverable and Windows considered it unformatted.

The Win2k8 R2 that I'm running is 64-bit, and I'm guess that maybe the Intel driver was 32-bit. The Tyan support site for the motherboard had only older 32-bit Intel Storage Matrix drivers (version 8.9, IIRC) and none of the newer 64-bit Intel RST drivers that I found elsewhere would load on the system.

Simple fix, though... I uninstalled the Intel Storage Matrix drivers, rebooted, and all is well again. No problems above 2TB. Sustained write speeds using the default drivers are now measurably faster, as well.
 
JJ Johnson said:
It's a 4TB drive, but I don't recall how much data that was on it. I also have several 3TB drives on the same system, same controller, well over the 2TB mark and haven't had any issues with them.
Click to expand...

I would check all other drives for errors, there is a good chance those got corrupted as well.
 
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