Dismounting External Drives mystery

[voltron7]

Hello, I've got a problem recently with my external disk drives vanishing. I've had theses 2 external HDs for over a year now, and this behavior started last week for no apparent reason! It really is making me insane because to get them back I have to power them on and off sometimes a few times, and sometimes I have to unplug and replug the cable (one's firewire and the other is eSATA...Does anyone know what the hell is going on????? It happens at least 6-8 time in a 10 hour day..I don't use sleep/hibernate/standby at all. If I'm not working on it, the computers get shut down. It's really irritating because I changed nothing at all, it just started to do this...Sorry to be repetative.

setups are as follows

CPU1
Vista Ultimate x64
iomega 500 GB connected with eSATA cable
NFTS


CPU2
XP pro x64
Maxtor One-Touch III 300GB connected with Firewire
NFTS

[stevesideas]

So, you didnt install any software or hardware that may have started these drives dismounting...no windows updates..no bios updates youve installed ? Something small you may have forgotten..maybe power management ?

[voltron7]

good ideas

Hi, those are all good ones, but no, none of the above. I don't enable the power management features, I just shut them down unless they are rendering overnight(s). And now, the problem has at least shown a decrease in occurances (for no known reason, too!?)

Thanks,
JR