M17 Hybrid Drive disappeared

Question

I have an M17 with 512GB SSB + 1TB (+8GB SSHD) Hybrid Drive.

On a reboot the Hybrid Drive is not being seen at all... by anything, as far as I can tell.

This happened completely out of the blue, immediately prior to this reboot I was working on a project on the D: partition of this drive and not aware of any problems of any kind).

I have tried

windows disk management tool (shows my SSD drive healthy with expected C: boot partition, system and recovery partitions, but no other drives)
CrystalDiskInfo (also shows the SSD healthy an no other disks)
pre-boot ePSA diagnostics - full system scan passes with flying colours
pre-boot look at BIOS Sys/Device info - I see no warnings

Nothing is even showing an error.

The only indication I can find that anything is aware of anything wrong is in the 3rd party software (eg DropBox, github) that expects to to find my D: drive and complains that it's not there.

I'm assuming that the drive has just died suddenly.

But I'm a bit puzzled that none of the diagnostic tools appear to have any memory of the drive even existing. Don't they do that? (save info about how things were so they can check up on them).

Anyone got an insights or suggestions? I'm open to the idea that it's just dead and I should give up on it, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can try.

For example I'm seeing stuff about hard reset and RTC reset as things to try but it's not clear that they're relevant as in all the similar cases I've come across searching for clues, it seems like something is seeing the disk, but in a bad state.... as opposed to nothing seeming to be aware of the disk at all.

And where would one look in the Device info (either in windows or pre-boot)... how is the hybrid drive connected?)

It's coming up to 6 years old. May be time to get a new one but frankly money's a bit tight.

BTW it's still running Windows 10 but seeing as even the pre-boot stuff doesn't seem to be aware of the disk I'm assuming it's a lower level problem than that.

RupeW · Answer

Another thought (sorry, don't seem to be able to edit the original question) - is there any point in opening it up to look for dodgy connections etc?

ejn63 · Answer

Does the system setup (F2 at powerup) see the drive in question? If it doesn't, unplug the system, remove the base cover and disconnect the main battery, hold the power button for 30 sec, and disconnect and reconnect the drive. If the drive is then not seen, it has failed.

RupeW · Answer

@ejn63​ Thanks for the reply. This is very strange. I had looked at the system set-up before and it wasn't seeing the drive.  But I figured I'd go through that process again before going through your steps. I just woke the laptop up from sleep, in preparation for rebooting and F2-ing.  It came straight up with a BIOS RTC error (on waking it up, without rebooting or anything), telling me to run setup! I hadn't done anything since I posted last. The battery is fully charged.  So I ran setup and now it is showing the drive! It's almost as if the threat of taking the base cover off made it decide to sort things out for me.  It does make me wonder if there's something wrong with the BIOS. I haven't tried using it in anger yet but it is showing the drive contents as before, my version control software appears to be working fine, etc.

ejn63 · Answer

You may want to replace the CMOS/reserve battery.  It sounds like it is dead.

RupeW · Answer

@ejn63​ Ah, that makes sense. I'll look into that. Thanks very much for the tip.

Alienware

M17 Hybrid Drive disappeared

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