Identify SATA hard drive
- by Rob Nicholson
Very similar question to:
Physically Identify the failed hard drive
But for Windows 2003 this time. Scenario:
Four identical SATA hard drives plugged into motherboard (no RAID controller here)
Configured as single drive in Windows as a spanned volume
One of them is starting to fail with error "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3"
How do you cross-reference Harddisk3 to the physical SATA connection on the motherboard so you know which drive to replace?
I know replacing this drive will trash the spanned array requiring it to be rebuilt anyway so my rough and ready solution is:
Delete the spanned partition
Create individual partitions on each drive labelled E: F: G: and H: and work out which one is Harddisk3
Power down, remove each disk one at a time, power-up until the drive letter disappears
But this seems a rather crude method of identifying the drive.
The SATA connectors will be numbered on the motherboard but I appreciate this might not cross-match to what Windows calls them.
Thanks, Rob.
