Internal hard drive missing. Not showing up in DiskUtility or System Profiler

[Jamnabot]

I recently noticed one of my internal SATA drives wasn't mounted, and wasn't showing up in DiskUtility to let me mount it manually.

I thought nothing of it until I started rebooting and STILL couldn't get the computer to see it.
I've tried the drive in all 4 of my internal bays and looked to see if shows up under BootCamp but no luck yet. My other internal drives work in any bay slot, so I don't think it's a fault with the MacPro.

As far as I know, it's spinning up and isn't making any dead-drive sounds I've heard in the past, it just seems to be invisible to the computer!

This is the first time I've had a drive potentially fail and I -haven't- been able to recover it with normal recovery tools, mainly because, well, if it doesn't show up in the bus, how am I meant to recover it anyway?

Does anyone have any advice for dealing with a drive when it's acting up like this?

[marc805]

Did you ever find a solution?

[6killer]

I'm having the same exact problem. I had an internal drive on the lower bay on my G5 disappear all of a sudden. It was fine 2 days ago. Several reboots don't reveal the drive. Disk Utilities shows no sign of it, nor does Disk Warrior. Any ideas? I haven't powered down and checked for signs just yet.

[PenguinMac]

Of course we all know that hard drives die, and how they fail can be completely unpredictable (I don't know if the big Google study on hard drive failures included percentages of which failure occurred & how often). Your only option is to buy a $30 USB cable-to-SATA drive mechanism from OWC or Newegg (not an enclosure, just a bunch of wires & connectors). If it doesn't show up on USB it's dead, dead, dead. Note if the drive elctronics failed, the hardware will spin up fine but won't communicate with the outside world.

[eponym]

Yeah, sounds dead to me :(

If it was just the connection hardware, you could probably still get the data off by taking it to a recovery service (if it's worth the cost).