Trying to identify faulty hard drive from system events

[Zatos]

I was wondering if someone could help me identify which hard drive is giving the error as listed in Windows event viewer under system. The event only lists the hard drive as "DeviceHarddisk1D". Now there are two drives I suspect but unfortunately with some of the things that happened it could be either one that is faulty. My main drive actually has a the D: letter assigned to it on a partition. However it is actually identified as Harddisk2. The Harddisk1 would actually be my second drive(as configured by the motherboard), and I thought maybe since the drive letters are really only assigned by Windows if it was actually giving the "hardware" drive letter instead of the "software" one. If that makes sense. Either that or the D means nothing at all.

 

The reason why I thought maybe it was my main hard drive is because 1- its new - 2- it seems like the system would stop responding whenever I heard the drive make a loud click noise - I figured that would only happen if it was the main system disk but I dont know if thats necessarily true. Plus it would lock up while loading Windows too, and so I dont know if that would have been affected by it being a secondary hard drive that shouldn't have been involved in that process.

 

The reason why it might be the second hard drive is because when all this was happening, I finally rebooted one time and that drive did not appear. I made sure all the cables were all the way in. The power plug seemed just a smidge loose, but it didnt seem like it would have been able to cause a problem. Especially since its been like that for a while.

 

Everything now is running fine, but its kind of hard to tell still whether or not its because of the way I have things set up. At the same time I did this I also removed the side panels and have my main hard drive loose (suspecting it may have been getting too hot as well). So its hard to tell what was actually causing the problem. The last thing also is that maybe the 'D' in the event also is just a code instead of a drive letter.

 

So any help is appreciated...

 

Thanks!

[Zatos]

Okay well can someone at least answer this - If it wasn't the primary OS drive, could another hard drive cause the system to lock up even though one is on SATA and one is on IDE? And could this happen during boots even when there should be nothing loading on the secondary drive?

[taowulf]

To get the actual device, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. You can see the actual hard drive address ( 0, 1, whatever) there.

[taowulf]

I missed this part before -

 

The reason why it might be the second hard drive is because when all this was happening, I finally rebooted one time and that drive did not appear. I made sure all the cables were all the way in. The power plug seemed just a smidge loose, but it didnt seem like it would have been able to cause a problem. Especially since its been like that for a while.

 

I had a similiar problem with a broken SATA power connector for my optical drive. It caused all kinds of oddness until I fixed the problem. Lockups when trying to read, failure to boot one time, then would boot fine on reboot, lockup on boot and so on.

[Zatos]

I missed this part before -

I had a similiar problem with a broken SATA power connector for my optical drive. It caused all kinds of oddness until I fixed the problem. Lockups when trying to read, failure to boot one time, then would boot fine on reboot, lockup on boot and so on.

 

So even though it was an optical drive, it would still cause your computer to lockup? If that's true, then it is very likely it was that drive. Also in response to the previous post, I was using the Disk Management screen, but I found even that to not correspond with the events because it lists my Sata drive as "Disk2" while technically it is "harddrive4"...