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Hard Drive Disappeared!

Rokusaburo

Rokusaburo

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 30, 2006
92
0
Melbourne, Australia
Hey gang,

I have a 2006 Mac Pro with a stock boot drive and 2 media drives, but today, when I woke up my computer from sleep, one of my boot drives (1TB) had disappeared. The icon does not show up on either the desktop or Finder and the drive does not appear in either Disk Utility or System Profiler.

I have tried rebooting several times, trying the drive in every slot and swapping it with my other drives, but still no luck!

If anyone has experienced a similar problem or if they know of a solution, that would be amazing!!
 
Hello,

Tech Tool Pro's a good idea.

If possible, you could try mounting the drive in an external enclosure and in someone else's Mac Pro.

Good Luck,

Loa
 
Can you tell if the drive is spinning up? An external enclosure would be ideal to check this, but if you dont have one then try plugging the drive tray in while the machine is on and listen closely for the whining sound of the motor. If the drive does not spin up it is dead.
 
You can also try to re-insert the tray, on the chance the connector isn't making good contact with the backplane connector in the HDD bay.

If that's not the case, and it's not spinning, the disk is likely DOA.
 
Loa said:
I didn't know Mac Pros allowed for such plug and play in the drive bays.

Loa
Click to expand...

The purpose here is just to apply power, which will occur if he makes a physical connection. I think it's moot whether the macpro supports hot-plugging since his drive isnt recognized anyway.
 
You might try SMART Utility.app to see if there is a failure on the drive.

A drive's logic board failure might be a problem.
 
cutterman said:
The purpose here is just to apply power, which will occur if he makes a physical connection. I think it's moot whether the macpro supports hot-plugging since his drive isnt recognized anyway.
Click to expand...
If the system is ON, you can damage the PSU that way, as it's not equiped with an Inrush Current Limiter (which is needed for Hot Plugging).
 
nanofrog said:
If the system is ON, you can damage the PSU that way, as it's not equiped with an Inrush Current Limiter (which is needed for Hot Plugging).
Click to expand...

Ah! Thx for the info. I'd always refrained from doing that, now I know why.

Loa
 
I think you folks are being a bit nit-picky. I have hot-plugged (or hot-powered) many drives on many PC's, some of which with cheap PSUs. So unless the macpro's PSU is vastly inferior, I dont think there will be a problem powering up one drive.
 
cutterman said:
I think you folks are being a bit nit-picky. I have hot-plugged (or hot-powered) many drives on many PC's, some of which with cheap PSUs. So unless the macpro's PSU is vastly inferior, I dont think there will be a problem powering up one drive.
Click to expand...
Some boards, add-in cards, or backplanes have the Inrush Current Limiter built-in as to make sure the system is protected.

In cases where the PSU doesn't have one, nor does anything else that the drive's power may be connected to, the PSU's ratings and actual load will matter. That is, if you've a substantial PSU, and the load is low enough, Hot-Plugging a disk is far less likely to cause any issues than a unit that's delivering power very near it's limits. Also keep in mind, that the ratings for most PSU's are peak ratings, not continuous. In such cases, dividing by the square root of 2 will give you the continuous value (i.e. 400W PSU is really only capable of ~283W continuous).

This may seem like nit picking, but I assure you, it's not. The details do matter, and as most system PSU's aren't all that robust with thier power delivery, are closer to their limits than most users realize. So to be sure that there won't be a problem, the Inrush Current Limiters are required for Hot-Plug support in workstations and servers.

You've been lucky on PC's (assuming they're consumer desktops).
 
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