After reinstalling the game from Microsoft Store (trying to link account to Steam), I get the error message "Phantasy Star Online 2 can’t open because it is offline. The storage device might be missing or disconnected." upon launching the game.

I checked my computer and my entire D : drive where the game was installed on is missing and no longer being identified by Windows. Restarted the computer to see if it was a glitch, the secondary hard drive is still missing and my computer takes almost 2 minutes to reboot now.

Please help. I don't know anything about computers.

Update: Hard drive also does not show up in BIOS

Unfortunately, it sounds like a physical disc problem. All you can do is open the case and check the cables connecting the hard drive to the motherboard, and possibly replace them. You will also need to check the cables from the power supply. If any of them seem to have damage, you need to try a different cable, otherwise, you might have to replace the Power Supply. Your hard drive may have also been dying for awhile and it finally did end up dying. Your best bet, without being tech savvy, is to take it to a repair shop. There is no way that the game itself broke the drive, though, unless it didn't have enough life left in it to install that much data, in which case it was just a coincidence.

@Ragnawind Hi Ragnawind, thank you for the information!

I understand where you're coming from as I've been doing some obsessive digging on the web about how to fix this hard drive issue. But I'm not convinced it's not the game because the same exact thing happened to my friend. Although we chalked it up to his computer being older (about 4 years), I just got mine, brand new 4 months ago... Also if the game can magically delete itself as reported by other players, I can't imagine this is just a coincidence.

Do you have any other suggestions on how to resolve this issue?

The only thing you can do then would be to put it into another computer. If it really was the game, it would only not allow it to be read on the computer where it was installed. If another can't even read it, it is definitely a hardware issue. Since you say it doesn't even show up in BIOS, that already rules the game out as the problem automatically, though.

if is not appearing in the BIOS then is not the game, something in your hardware made you lose connection to the unit and if you are lucky is just a bad cable if not then something there killed your unit but the only way to check that is connecting it to another computer using other cables

I'm pretty sure that it's got something to do with the game itself, both me and my girlfriend have had the same issue. Lucky for me I had two hard drives, but once we tried to uninstall the game, my secondary drive (where it was installed) and her only drive both got killed. The issue seems that the computer can still detect the drive, but whatever files or code that causes it to actually obtain info off the drive is liable to be deleted. I can still find my drive through disk management but as soon as I uninstalled the game the drive died now I can't access it. Also this game had that problem back in 2013, where it would kill players hard drives...

@Vakma said in Hard Drive Missing after Game Install:

I'm pretty sure that it's got something to do with the game itself, both me and my girlfriend have had the same issue. Lucky for me I had two hard drives, but once we tried to uninstall the game, my secondary drive (where it was installed) and her only drive both got killed. The issue seems that the computer can still detect the drive, but whatever files or code that causes it to actually obtain info off the drive is liable to be deleted. I can still find my drive through disk management but as soon as I uninstalled the game the drive died now I can't access it. Also this game had that problem back in 2013, where it would kill players hard drives...

I have never heard of that happening with JP. Also, you already said that it doesn't appear in BIOS. If it doesn't appear in BIOS, but it does appear in Disk Management, the hard drive is just dead, though not completely dead. One of my family member's HDD recently just died all of a sudden, but they didn't even have this game installed. It showed up in Disk Management, but none of the hard drive partitions would open. They had it split into 4 drive letters. Sometimes they just wouldn't show up at all, but still showed in Disk Management. This is apparently an issue of dead disc in the HDD or an I/O error, which happens after too many read-write attempts In other words, a hard drive that died of natural causes from aging.

@Vakma that sounds to me that your hard drive was already dying and the uninstalation just finished the job because I never heard of a game killing a HDD only corrupting then and if you are using a hard drive for almost 6 years or more than that then the probability of dying at any moment is pretty high, also disk management helps in nothing even dead units will appear there the only way to know when is dead is when the BIOS won't recognize it

That could be, from what I hear the game has a weird way of uninstalling itself and pretty poor file management. I know my girlfriend had a fairly old laptop, I think just about 6 years and I'm not sure how old my HDD was, I can believe it was just too much and sent them over. Still not a good look though. What is strange is that, at first it wouldn't show up at tall, then it started showing up again in disk management and the file explorer, albeit as an unknown device, through disk management and the event checker I can still access and open the files on it. So at least there's that if I want to recover some of that stuff.