Hard Drive Issue? (MSI GS60 Ghost Pro)

Hi All,

This may be long so please bear with me. I'm hoping MSIGeno sees this and can provide his recommendation.

I haven't been on the forums in years, so I had to make a new account (couldn't remember my old login info). I bought a GS60 back in March of 2015, so it's less than a year old.

I have only taken it outside of my house once for vacation, so it has been babied. I absolutely love the laptop. The only issue I've had (until recently) is that it can get pretty hot, so some of the rubber feet have come off the bottom. I expected that, though, with so much going on in such a slim laptop. No biggie. I use it on a laptop cooling pad w/fans most of the time.

The laptop came with two hard drives: a 128GB SSD (C: drive) and a 1TB HDD (D: drive). The C: is used for bootup and core programs, and I have everything else (personal user files, games, programs, etc..) on the D: drive.

The past few weeks I've had a pretty major problem that has become so frequent that it happens several times a day. Once the laptop is up and running it acts normal. The issue is whenever I try to either wake it from sleep or boot it up from shutdown. The laptop will get to the MSI splash screen during startup, but it sits there with the spinning wheel. During this time the hard drive activity light is dark. If it sits here long enough (2-3mins) it eventually just shuts off completely.

Sometimes it will boot up to the desktop, but I get the message (paraphrasing here): "Unable to locate D:\Desktop.....etc.." All of my taskbar icons are gone, none of my shortcuts utilizing items on the D: will work, and the D: drive does not even show up under my computer. To me it seems like the laptop has completely lost connection with the hard drive.

It sometimes takes several reboots to get it back up and running properly. Again, once it's running it acts normal. Everything is super fast, and I haven't had any typical symptoms of a dying hard drive.



The laptop came with Windows 8, but I upgraded to Windows 10 some time back. It ran fine for several months. Once this started happening I ended up doing a complete factory restore & re-upgrade to Windows 10. It did not help. I am currently in the process of another full factory restore (complete wipe of all files/programs/data). This time I don't plan on upgrading to see if it's related to Windows 10 at all.

Assuming that this restore does not work (I don't have my hopes up), does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? A few weeks ago I took the bottom panel off and made sure that the HDD cable was firmly seated. It seemed fine but I did not touch anything else so that I could prevent voiding the warranty.


I appreciate your help in advance. This is driving me nuts, but I'm getting to the point where I may have to send it in to be looked at.


Thank you!!

-Matt

 

The hang up on boot would be related to the SSD while the D drive errors once starting would be related to the HDD. You might try just reseating both the HDD and SSD. You could try picking up an external HDD enclosure and seeing if the HDD is recognized that way for a bad HDD or a bad cable. If you got it last March, you should still be under warranty so you might check with where you bought it as well.

 

Hey Alex,

Thank you for the quick reply. As soon as it's done restoring I'm going to reboot it a few times to see the issue persists. If so I'll try your recommendation of reseating the hard drives. I only reseated the HDD cable the first time I had it open, so hopefully reseating the drive does the trick. With it acting normal most of the time but intermittently dropping off completely, it still strikes me as a connection issue. I'll cross my fingers!

Thanks again,
Matt

 

Hope you got her fixed up over the weekend!

 

Hey Alex,

Sorry for the lack of response--it was a hectic weekend!

The Windows reboot did not work, so I went through the process of re-seating the HDD. It seemed to help at first, but within a few hours it started dropping off again.

I swapped in a 2.5" SSD from a backup laptop to see if it was the hard drive. This also seemed to help at first, but again it started dropping off. I put the original HDD back in and wiped it clean. I moved everything to the C: for now so that the HDD is only used as a spare drive. It has been coming and going, but the C: has been functioning perfectly.


I have been wanting to upgrade the 128GB M.2 drive, anyway, so I ordered a 500GB replacement that will be here today. I'm going to swap it in and use it while I decide whether or not I want to deal with sending it in.

Thank you again for your help!

 

Good to hear! Sounds like you isolated the issue and it's not what we were hoping for so might have to send it in to see what's going on with the SATA controller.

 

Hi Matt, do you have recovery disc set? If not, you can contact MSI for a recovery disc set which may take care of the issue you are having. SATA controller seldom fail (can almost say never), but if problem persists then it may be the drive itself.