[Sheezwack]

Hi guys,

I have a bit of a strange one here. Sometimes if I put the htpc to (S3) Sleep and wake, the 2nd and 3rd Sata hard drive will disconnect and be unavilable unless I reboot.

It doesn't happen every time, but if you sleep two or three times in a row it normally happens pretty quickly.

The strange thing is, it only seems to happen when XBMC is open. If you boot up, quit XBMC and then sleep/wake it doesn't appear to happen.

It was almost like the drives were being disconnected after it wakes because windows made that hardware removed sound, so I did a registry fix which forced windows to treat all sata ports as fixed and not removable devices. But it didn't fix the problem.

Is there anything that could cause this? I have two htpc's which are almost identical, it only happens to one of them.

[Sheezwack]

Maybe Ill try hibernation instead

[london_dog]

is the fix official windows? or 3rd party?

maybe its a bios setting if they're almost identical, and only happens on one of them.

are both mobo's the same?

[Sheezwack]

The fix was adjusting registry settings as explained here, it worked fine, but didn't solve the problem:
http://superuser.com/questions/12955/how...-tray-icon

The motherboards are identical, cpu's are identical. Hard drives are different capacities but same brand. And the one that has the issues has a bluray player, the other doesn't.

I'm wondering if on some boots the hard drives aren't getting power quick enough to be detected or something?

It's just strange that it only seems to happen with XBMC open. That doesn't make any sense to me.

[london_dog]

do you see the bios display its post messages when its booting, or do you get a splash display?

if you look at whats going on, you could see wether the pc see's the drives when its booting.

that would confirm wether thats a possibility.

have you checked disk management (inside computer manager) too, to see if windows actually see's the drives?

[Sheezwack]

Yeah the drives work fine, they show up during boot and work fine in windows.

Even if you wake from sleep with XBMC closed they work fine.

It's only when XBMC is open and you wake from sleep that they dissapear. I even setup event ghost to quit XBMC whenever it goes to sleep and restart XBMC when it wakes up and that fixed it - but this step shouldn't be necessary.

Does XBMC do any drive remapping when waking from sleep or something?

[london_dog]

don't have a clue I'm afraid. from the event ghost you'e setup it clearly looks like xbmc open when going into sleep causes some problems.

are you running version 10 of xbmc?

I had a quick looks through the settings, and can't find anything to do with hard drives in there.

edit, just tried going in and out of sleep on my system and it works fine...

[Sheezwack]

Hey, yeah version 10 of XBMC. Even if I quit everything like eventghost but leave XBMC open I still get the same issue, so it appears to be cause by XBMC somehow - I just don't understand how.

It's mind boggling especially when I have a second near-identical htpc that works fine.

By the way it doesn't happen every single time. I can go sleep/wake sleep/wake and it will normally disconnect the hard drives on the third attempt or so.

Anyhow managed to work around it by telling eventghost to quit XBMC before it sleeps then load it up again when it wakes. It's not ideal but I can't think of any other solutions.

[london_dog]

apart from copying the settings over from the other machine, and reinstalling xbmc, I'm out of suggestions I'm afraid

[Sheezwack]

Yeah I could reinstall xbmc, will it keep my existing library data? I suppose it doesnt matter for that one, will just need to set it up again.

Thanks for the help anyway